THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY IN THE
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS.
h'M w
jAMi'.S MVi.KIMM' KSU WN *, ^
tMii»ii«t« i® m
m* Min AN AW *** t tu\
AV«t' I W4, - th ** * *
JwfM, . . *< tfW't** w* *
t\mhhis<K * M *<*•"** ^ * imt>
MW»*«* 4 , * ' *V**.rf« «*>'
14 * Wv,
The Evolution., of Theology
in the
Greek Philosophers
The Giffmi Lectures
delivered in the University of Glasgow in
Sessions 1900-1 and 1901-2
By Edward Caird
i.t.,1)., n.utt.
Fellow of the ftmfoh Academy ; Cart tog Member of the French Academy
Mantra of lialHoi College, Oxford ; latte Protestor of Mural Philosophy
in the University of Glasgow
Vol. I.
Glasgow
James MacLehose and Sons
Publishers to the University
1904
All rights rmrmd
I>K!>T<!ATKI>
T<> TUB MKMOtlY OF
WILLIAM WALLACE
I.ATK KK.HHOW AND TUTOR. OK MKHTOK COM.KOK, AND
WHITK’h PKOKKHHOft OK MORAT* rillMWOPHY
IN THK tJNIVKUKlTT OF OXFORD
AV Mtfnfo nl'rr t*ri/n
A ?!<* !ii>y t r: unfrr tin n linin!;rhff, Tip,
Jfibs tit tyr i*U,
PREFACE
Thkse volumes contain the Gifford Lectures delivered
in the University of Glasgow in Sessions 1900-1
and 1901-2. I have, however, rewritten most of
them, and have added three lectures upon parts
of the subject which I was not able to discuss
with sufficient fullness.
I have attempted, so far as was possible within
the limits of such a course of lectures, to give an
account of those ideas of Greek philosophy which
have most powerfully affected the subsequent develop-
ment of theological thought. In doing so, 1 have
had to make a selection of topics which may require
some explanation, both as to what it includes and
as to what it excludes. On the one hand, I have
thought it best to confine myself mainly to the
most important writers, to Plato and Aristotle,
to the chief representatives of tins Stoic philosophy,
and to Philo and Plotinus among the Neo-Platonists ;
and I have made no attempt to deal with secondary
vli
PREFACE
viii
variations of opinion among the less important
writers of the various schools. On the other hand,
in regard to the philosophers of whom I have
written more fully, I have dealt with many aspects
of their thought which may not seem to bear directly
upon theology. Thus I have treated at considerable
length the question of the development of the
Platonic philosophy in its logical and ethical as
well as in its metaphysical and theological aspects.
And though I have not gone quite so far in other
cases, I have not hesitated to introduce a compara-
tively full account of the theoretical and practical
philosophy of Aristotle and of the Stoics. It seemed
to me quite impossible to show the real meaning
of the theological speculations of these writers
without tracing out their connexion with the other
aspects of their philosophy. In the case of Plotinus
I do not need to make any such statement ; for
theology is so obviously the centre of all his thought,
that everything else has to be directly viewed in
relation to it. In truth, however, this is only a
matter of degree. A man's religion, if it is
genuine, contains the summed-up and concentrated
meaning of his whole life; and, indeed, it can
have no value except in so far as it does so.
And it is even more obvious that the theology of
a philosopher is the ultimate outcome of his whole
view of the universe, and particularly of his con-
PREFACE
IX
Ception of the nature of man. It is, therefore,
impossible to show the real effect and purport of
the former without exhibiting very carefully and
fully its relations to the latter.
I find it very difficult to trace out my obligations
to the numerous writers on the subjects of which
I have written. Of the books which I have recently
studied, I owe most to Baumkers Das Problem der
Materie in der GriecMschen Philosophic, to Bonhoffer’s
Epictet und die Stoa, and to the account of Plotinus
in von Hartmann’s Geschichte der Metaphysih I may
also mention Whitaker’s The Neo-Platonists , which
contains a very careful and thorough account of the
whole history and influence of Neo-Platonism.
I have been much assisted by the opportunity
I have had of discussing various points with Professor
Cook Wilson, with Professor Henry Jones, and with
Mr. J. A. Smith of Balliol College.
Professor Jones and Mr. E. A. Duff of Glasgow
University have read all the proofs of these volumes,
and have made many suggestions which have been
very useful to me.
The work of preparing an Index has been kindly
undertaken by Mr. Hayward Porter.
Balliol College,
Oxford, November , 1903.
CONTENTS
LECTURE FIRST.
THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO THEOLOGY.
The Development of Religion— Its Relation to Theology, as the
Reflective Form of the Religious Consciousness— Increasing
Influence of Reflexion in the Highest Religions, especially in
Judaism and Christianity— How a Religion grows into a
Theology— How Theology and Religion, Reason and Faith,
become opposed to each other— Importance of the Interests
on both sides— The Danger of sacrificing either of them to
the other— The Idea of Evolution as an Eirenicon — The unity
of man’s life in its different phases— Carlyle’s view of the
Alternation of Action and Reflexion — Objections to the Law
of Evolution, (1) from those who separate Philosophy from
Life, (2) from those who separate Life from Philosophy— In
what sense Theology begins in Greece, * . 1-30
LECTURE SECOND.
STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY.
The Central Idea of Religion, and its Reflective Expression in
Theology— The Opposition of the Secular and the Religious
Consciousness— That the Idea of Religion is expressed only
xi
u CONTENTS
in the Highest Religion — Answer to an Objection to this
View — Three Periods in the Development of Theology-
Characteristics of the Theological Philosophy of Greece—
Characteristics of the Theology of the Early Christian and
Medieval Periods— Characteristics of Moderxi Theology or
Philosophy of Religion, 31-57
LECTURE THIRD
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO.
Plato as the Father of Theology — His Mysticism and his
Idealism — The Eleatic and Ionic Schools — The One and the
Many— Socrates — His Relation to Anaxagoras— His Limi-
tation of Philosophy to Ethics — His Idea of the Moral Life
as an Art — His View of the Place of Knowledge in
Morality — Onesidedness of this View — The Conscious and
the Unconscious in Moral Life — Individualistic Tendencies
of Socrates and the Minor Socratics— Plato’s Philosophy as
a Synthesis of Pre-Socratic with Soeratic Ideas, . . 58-70
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PLATONIC IDEALISM.
Plato as the Disciple of Socrates — His Dissatisfaction with the
Soeratic view of Ethics — The Dialogue Protagoras as the
Turning-point— Socrates opposed as a scientific Hedonist to
the Morality of Opinion — The Problem of the Meno — The
Myth of Reminiscence and its Meaning— The Development
of Knowledge from Opinion to Science— Right Opinion as
Inspiration— The New View of Ethics in the Gorgias—
Doing What We Will, and Doing What Seems Best — Opposi-
tion of a Science of Ethics which begins with the Idea of the
Whole to Hedonism— Light thrown by this Distinction upon
the Theory of Ideas, 80-108
CONTENTS
xiii
LECTUEE FIFTH.
THE NATURE OF IDEAS AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY.
Development of the Ideal Theory — Negative Relation of Ideas
to Sense and Opinion exhibited in the Phaedo — Their Positive
Relation exhibited in the Symposium — The Mystic and the
Artist — Plato’s Metaphysical Attempt to combine these
two Relations — The Systematic Unity of Ideas — The Prin-
ciple of Anaxagoras and his Application of it— Plato’s
Criticism of Anaxagoras — His method not different from
that of the Physical Philosophers — Plato’s Substitute for it —
The Theory of Ideas and the Method of Dialectic — Regress
to the Highest Idea — Plato’s Yiew of the Relation of Final
to Efficient Causes.
Note on Plato’s Relation to Anaxagoras — The devrepos tt\ov s —
Ideas as Causes — The Regressive Method and the Hierarchy
of Ideas, , 109-139
LECTURE SIXTH.
THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD.
The Republic as an Educational Treatise— The Organic Idea of
the State — Plato’s Opposition to Individualism — His Socialism
—•The Philosopher-King— That Virtue is Knowledge only for
the Ruler — The Ideal too great for the City-State — Plato’s
Criticism of the Mythology of Greece and his Proposals for its
Improvement— Mythology for the Many and Philosophy for
the Few — Possibility of such a Division between Faith and
Reason — Two Ways of Idealism — The Idea of Good — The
Unworldliness of the Philosopher— Difficulty of connecting
Contemplation with Practice— Three ways of Defining the
Idea of Good : First, by Extension of the Individual Ideal
of Socrates ; Secondly, by the Analogy of the Sun ; Thirdly,
by the Synthesis of the Principles of the Sciences— Criticism
of the Neo-Platonic Explanation of the Idea of Good—
XIV
CONTENTS
Difficulty of Defining the Ultimate Principle of Unity — Mystic
and Idealistic Solutions of it — The Delation of the Idea of
Good to God, 140-1 72
LECTUEE SEVENTH.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS.
Necessity of Uniting Analysis and Synthesis in Dialectic — Plato’s
Conception of the Art of Rhetoric — His Method of Division —
His Attempt to Combine the Eleatic with the Heraclitean
Doctrines — His Criticism of Sensationalism and the Doc-
trine of Flux in the Theaetetus — His Criticism of Abstract
Idealism and the Eleatic Conception of the One in the
Sophist — The Problem of the One and the Many in the
Parmenides — Ideas not Abstractions or Separate Sub-
stances, but Principles of Unity in Difference — Ideas neither
purely Objective nor purely Subjective— The Unity of
Thought and Reality — Absolute Reality of Mind— Are
Minds the only Real Substances— Possibility of Degrees of
Reality— Plato’s Grades of Souls, . 173-197
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL AND THE IDEA OF GOD.
The Argument of the Phaedo — Connection of the Doctrine of
the Immortality of the Soul with the conception of Transmi-
gration— Wordsworth and Plato— Inference from the Nature
of the Objects of Intelligence as contrasted with Sensible
Objects— The Ontological Argument for Immortality— Its
Relation to the Ontological Argument for the Being of God
Objections to both— Restatement of them in a better form —
Argument of the Republic— The^Soul not destroyed by the
Pe^th .q£ the Bpdjr— Argument o?the P/iZdrus ^ The Soul as
Self-mover— The Relation of all Souls or Minds to the Divine
Intelligence, . 196-220
CONTENTS
xv
LECTURE NINTH*
FINAL RESULTS OF THE IDEALISM OF PLATO.
The Relation of the Ideal to the Phenomenal World — The Ideal
World Organic in itself— Distinction of its Differences from the
Differences of the Phenomenal World— The Question -whether
Plato misconceived the Abstraction of Science — The Limit
and the Unlimited in the Pkilebus — Distinction of Being and
Becoming, of Knowledge and Opinion, in the Timaeus — The
Substratum of the Changing Qualities of the Phenomenal
World — Its Identification with Space — The Phenomenal as
an Image of the Ideal — Dilemma as to its Reality— How
the Conditions of Time and Space cause Imperfection— The
Distinction of the Conditions and the Causes of Things — The
Goodness of God as the Cause of the Existence of the World —
The Soul as a Mediating Principle between Mind and Body-
Mathematical Principles as Intermediates between Ideas and
Sensible Things — The Universe as the Only-Begotten Son of
God — The Mystic and Idealistic Aspects of Platons Philosophy
— Is God for Plato Transcendent or Immanent ? . 221-259
LECTURE TENTH.
THE TRANSITION FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE.
Supposed Opposition between the Platonic and Aristotelian
Types of Mind — -Aristotle’s Relation to Plato — Plato’s * Ten-
dency to Unify and Aristotle’s to Distinguish— Ambiguity of
the two Doctrines, that the Individual is the Real, and that
the Universal is the Real — How they Differ and how they
may be Reconciled — Common Source of Error in both Philo-
sophies — Aristotle’s Empiricism — His Conception of Organic
Unity and Development — How far he carries these Ideas —
Man as a Complex Being not One with Himself — That Dis-
cursive Reason and the Feelings of Love and Hate belong to
the Perishable Part of Man — Aristotle ultimately more
Dualistic than Plato, 260-285
xvi CONTENTS
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS PRACTICAL USE.
The Definition of the Soul— The Life of Nutrition and Repro-
duction in Plants— The Life of Sensation and Appetite in
Animals — The Life of Reason and Will in Man— The Division
of the Practical from the Contemplative Life — Beginnings of
this Division in Plato and its Completion in Aristotle — Sense
in which Ethics is a Science— Dependence of Moral Science
upon Practice — How it can assist Practice— Man as a cr^Ocrov
—The Bliss of the Contemplative Life— How far Man can
Partake in it — The Religious Aspect of Ethics and of the
Contemplative Life, 286-314
LECTURE TWELFTH.
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS THEORETICAL TJS&
Aristotle’s View of the Relation of Reason and Passion— His
Ambiguous Utterances as to the Will— Tendency to forgot
the Unreflective Activity of Reason— Difficulties in Relation
to the Free Activity of Reason in Contemplation— Experience
as the Beginning of all Knowledge— Conception of Science as
Demonstration — Various Views of Scientific Method— Aris-
totle’s Actual Method higher than his Logical Theory-
Connexion of his Method with his Individualism— Whether an
Individual Substance can be regarded as part of a more Com-
prehensive Individual Substance— Difficulties in the Definition
of Substance— Account of Reason in the De Anima — Its two
Aspects— Its Relation to Objects— Distinction of Actual and
Potential Reason— The Relation of Reason to Sense— The
Intuitive Reason and its Freedom from Error — Sensible and
Intelligible Matter — How far Intuitive Reason frees itself
from both— Difficulties as to the purely Affirmative Nature of
Intuitive Reason— Whether the Object of Aristotle's Intuitive
Reason is Abstract— Tendency to Mysticism as the Result of
Aristotle’s View, 316-349
CONTENTS
XVB
LECTURE THIRTEENTH.
DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG TO THEORETICAL OR TO
PRACTICAL REASON ?
Aristotle’s Exaltation of Theory contrasted with Kant’s View
of the Primacy of Practical Reason — Kant’s View of Experi-
ence and its Relation to the Ideas of Reason — The Ideas of
God, Freedom and Immortality — Knowledge and Belief —
Belief founded on the Will to Believe — Likeness and Differ-
ence of the Kantian and the Aristotelian views — Insufficiency
of Subjective Grounds of Belief — Kant’s View of the Relation
of Teleology and Mechanism — Teleological Conceptions in
Modem Biology — How Kant supplies the Means of Tran-
scending his own Conception of Knowledge — Relation of
Consciousness and Self-consciousness — The Identity beneath
the Difference of Reason and Will — Relativity of the Opposi-
tion of What Is to What Ought To Be— Aristotle’s View of
the Relation of Formal and Final to Efficient and Material
Causes — The False Ideal of Exact Science — In what Sense
the Highest Object is the Simplest — Why we find Contin-
gency in the Lives of Animals and Men — The Unity of the
Ideal and the Real — The Unity of the Theoretical and the
Practical Consciousness, .... . 350-382
LECTUEE FIEST.
THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO THEOLOGY.
A great part of the scientific and philosophical work
of this century has been the application of the idea
of evolution to the organic world and to the various
departments and interests of human life. And, as
religion is the most comprehensive of all these
interests — that which goes highest and lowest in
man, and, as it were, sums up in itself all other
interests — it was inevitable that the attempt should
be made to throw new light on it by means of this
idea. I need not dwell upon the importance and
extent of the researches into the whole history of
man's religious life which have been prompted and
guided by this conception, nor upon the variety
of interpretations which have been given to it. In
a set of lectures delivered in another University, 1
I endeavoured to deal with certain aspects of the
subject. I there tried to show, in the first place,
1 The Evolution of Religion (MacLehose & Sons, Glasgow).
VOL- I. A
2 THE RELATION OF
what is the principle that underlies and finds ex-
pression in the religious life of man, or, in other
words, what it is that makes him a religious being,
a being who in all ages has been conscious of himself
as standing in vital relation to a supreme object of
reverence and worship whom he calls God. In
the second place, I tried to show that, while this
consciousness of God finds an adequate expression
only in the highest forms of religious thought and
experience, we can detect the beginnings of it, under
very crude and elementary forms, even in the super-
stitions of savages. And, though our knowledge does
not yet enable us, if it ever will enable us, to solve
many of the problems connected with the transmission
and filiation of the religious movements of different
times and nations, yet we can trace out a fairly distinct
and continuous series of stages through which the
religious life of man has passed.
There is, however, one aspect of this process of
development which is worthy of special attention, and
on which I could only touch incidentally in my former
lectures. This is the great and growing importance
of reflective thought — in other words, of the conscious
reaction of mind upon the results of its own un-
conscious or obscurely conscious movements — in the
sphere of religion. The impulse which makes man
religious, and which determines the character of the
object worshipped as well as the manner of worship,
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 3
may be a rational one, but it is certainly not due
in the first instance to the activity of conscious
reason. As man thinks and argues, makes judgments
and draws inferences, long before he begins to exa min e
into the nature and laws of the logical process, as
he builds up for himself some kind of social order
and learns to observe moral rules and customs long
before he thinks of asking for any ultimate principle
of ethics, so he is a religious being long before he
seeks to understand or to criticise, to maintain or to
dispute the validity of- the religious consciousness.
Theology is not religion ; it is at best the philosophy
of religion, the reflective reproduction and explana-
tion of it; and, as such, it is the product of a time
that has outgrown simple faith and begun to feel the
necessity of understanding what it believes. E a rly
religion does not trouble itself about its own justifica-
tion : it does not even seek to make itself intelligible.
It manifests itself in a ritual rather than a creed.
And even when, as in Greece, it becomes more articu-
late and rises to some imaginative expression of itself
in a mythology which can furnish a theme for art
and poetry, yet, even then, it does not ask for any
reason for its own existence, or attempt to gather up
its general meaning and purport in a doctrine. It is
intuitive rather than reflective, practical rather than
speculative, conscious rather than self-conscious. It
has a vigorous life, which maintains itself against all
4 THE RELATION OF
the other interests of man and strives to subdue and
assimilate them to itself; but it does not endeavour
to formulate its own principle or estimate its relations
to these other interests. We are a long way down
the stream of religious history ere we meet with
anything like a book-religion, i.e. a religion that has
a sufficiently definite view of itself to fix its own
image in a sacred literature. And from that there
is still a long way to traverse ere we find any attempt
made to liberate the religious idea from its imaginative
dress, to define the character of the object of worship,
or to discuss its relations to nature and to man.
Nevertheless man is from the first self-conscious,
and he is continually on the way to become more
clearly conscious of himself and of all the elements
and phases of his being. Slow as may be the
movement of his advance, the time must at last
come when he turns back in thought upon him-
self, to measure and criticise, to select and to
reject, to reconsider and remould by reflexion,
the immediate products of his own religious life.
And though he can never metaphorically, any
more than literally, ‘ stand upon his head though
the day will never come when, in Goethe’s sati-
rical phrase, the world shall be held together by
philosophy and not by hunger and love; though,
in short, man cannot lay the foundations of his
existence in coxxscious reason, or build it up from
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
5
beginning to end with deliberate plan and purpose;
yet in the long process of his history the part
played by reflexion must become more and more
important. Even if we allow that reflective thought
cannot originate any entirely new moral or religious
movement, yet it is inevitable that it should
become continually more powerful to disturb and to
modify religious faith, and that, in consequence,
man’s hold of beliefs which he cannot justify to
himself should become more and more relaxed.
Nay, it is inevitable that the results of reflective
criticism should enter more and more deeply into
the very substance of religion itself, so that it be-
comes scarcely possible for those who hold it to
avoid theorising it.
Thus, to take an obvious instance, the later
religion of the Jews was no longer that simple
religious sentiment which held the race of Israel
together by binding them all to the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It had become enriched
with wider thoughts by the chequered experiences
of its national history, by the captivity and exile
— which, as it were, tore it away from its natural
root and forced it to seek a new and spiritual
principle of life — by the manifold relations of sym-
pathy and antagonism with other peoples into which
the Hebrews were brought. Thus it was that
the most narrowly national of all races gradually
6 THE RELATION OF
became the organ of a spirit of prophecy, which looked
forward to the universal reign of a God of all men,
whose worshippers should he distinguished not by
race but only by the energy and purify of their
moral life. For it may fairly be said that if the
prophets still put forward a claim for the supremacy
of Israel, it was rather as the leader of humanity in
the path of spiritual progress than as a specially
privileged and exclusive nationality. A religion
that thus rose into the atmosphere of universality,
freeing the spirits of its worshippers from the bonds
of time and place, was no product of mere feeling or
unconscious reason. It showed in its inmost texture
the working of reflexion, and its life could be sus-
tained only by continued reflexion. It was so far
lifted above all that was local and particular in
Judaism that it could encounter the speculative
thought of Greece almost upon equal terms. It
had become itself something like a philosophy, and
could, therefore, in Alexandria and elsewhere, easily
make terms with another philosophy, and blond or
coalesce with it into a new product.
And what is true of the religion of Israel is still
more true of Christianity. Springing out of a
Judaism which was already deeply tinged with
Greek ideas, and developing itself under the con-
stant pressure of Greek influences, Christianity was
from the first what we may call a reflective re-
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
7
ligion, a religion which gathered into itself many of
the results of both Eastern and Western thought.
Already in the New Testament, it is not only a
religion, hut it contains, especially in the writings
of St. Paul, the germs of a theology. Hence, strictly
speaking, it has never been, and can never be, a
religion of simple faith; or, if it ever relapses into
such a faith, it immediately begins to lose its
spiritual character, and to assimilate itself to re-
ligions that are lower in the scale. It is not
merely that, as Anselm and the Schoolmen generally
contended, it is allowable for the Christian to
advance from faith to reason, from venemtio to
delectatio , but that, for him, not to do so is speedily
to lose hold of that which is most valuable in his
faith. And if he yields to a fear of the dangers
of reflexion, with the doubt and perplexity which
attend it, and declines into the easier path of
reliance on some kind of authority, he will inevit-
ably turn his creed into a dead formula and his
worship into a superstition. This does not, of
course, mean that a true Christian must be a
philosopher — philosophy is a special department of
activity like any other — but it means that the
Christian cannot in the long run maintain his faith
unless he is continually turning it into living
thought, using it as a key to the difficulties of life,
and endeavouring to realise what light it throws on
8 THE RELATION OF
his own nature and on his relations to lxis fellow-
men and to God. And, if he does so, however
small may be his speculative powers, liis religion is
on the way to become a theology.
Here, however, we meet with one of our greatest
difficulties, a difficulty which, more than any other,
has embarrassed the development of religion during
the last two centuries. For it is an obvious fact
that philosophy or reflective thought has often been
regarded, and not seldom has regarded itself, not as
the ally and interpreter, but as the enemy of the
faith in which religion begins ; not as evolving and
elucidating, but as disintegrating and destroying, the
beliefs which are the immediate expression of the
religious life. And sometimes also it has undertaken
to provide a more or less efficient substitute for
them. This was the claim put forward in behalf
of the so-called Natural Religion by many represen-
tatives of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century,
and it has been supposed to be put forward by the
adherents of some later systems of thought. On
the other hand, there have been, and there are, many
who hold that the teaching of reason and philosophy
upon religious subjects is mainly negative; that its
chief result is to show that all religious faith is
what Matthew Arnold called extra-belief (Aberglaube),
an illusion of the imagination and the feelings for
which there is no rational evidence; or at least
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 9
that, if it does substitute anything for the complex
creeds of Christendom, it is something so vague and
general that it cannot have any important influence
upon the life of man. Thus the Supreme Being of
Deism was so distant and abstract a conception that,
it could scarcely be said to do more than keep the
place open for a possible God. And Mr. Herbert
Spencer does not substantially alter the case, when
he claims the whole sphere of attainable knowledge
for science, and generously gives up to religion the
infinite spaces of the Unknowable. Eor a worship
of the Unknowable would at best only serve the
purpose of the lictor who in the midst of a Roman
triumph reminded the victorious Imperator that he
too was mortal. Religion, on such a basis, would be
nothing but a recognition of the impassable bounds
of the flammantia moenia mundi, the inevitable limits
of human knowledge and human destiny. It could
not be — what Christianity and all the higher religions
have claimed to be — the great power that consecrates
and idealises the life of man by relating it to that
which is eternal and divine.
Such a view of reason as the rival or enemy of faith
is naturally met, on the other side, by a proclamation
of faith as the enemy of reason. If natural religion
be set up as the substitute for revealed religion, it
is eagerly pointed out by some theologians that the
substitute is inefficient ; that, as it rests upon abstract
10 THE RELATION OF
thought, it can at best meet the wants only of the few
who live by thought, and that, even for them, it is a
precarious and uncertain possession ; since it is devoid
of that power of interesting the feelings and transform-
ing the life which belongs to the beliefs that come
to us in a more direct way, prior to and independent
of the deliberate action of the intelligence. On the
other hand, if it be argued that reason is entirely
opposed to the claims of faith, that its attempts
to deal with the problem of religion inevitably lead to
a conviction that the problem is insoluble by any of
the methods of human science, and that, therefore, the
only rational creed is Agnosticism — this very argument
is apt to be accepted by religious men as a confession
of the incapacity of reason to deal with the highest
interests of man’s spiritual life. In this way many
Roman Catholic writers like I)e Maistro, and many
Protestant writers like Mansel and, to a certain extent
also, Mr. Balfour, have tried to maintain the cause
of religion on the basis of philosophical scepticism.
They have contended that reason, except within the
limits of empirical science, is a purely analytical
and therefore disintegrating agency, which can create
nothing and develop nothing, and which tears up
by the roots the tree of life in the effort to see
how it grows. They have sometimes endeavoured,
on the basis of the Kantian criticism of knowledge,
to show that, in face of the great problems of life —
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
11
of all the problems, in fact, with which religion is
specially concerned — reason is placed between two
alternatives, neither of which it is able to accept as
true. And they have in various ways tried to exploit
this incompetence of reason in the interests of faith,
sometimes of faith in an external authority, at other
times of a faith in some immediate or intuitive
consciousness which is maintained to be prior to
reason and above its criticism.
Now, whatever side we take in such a controversy,
the result seems to be that there is a deep and
apparently incurable schism in the spiritual life of
man, a schism between his unconscious and his con-
scious life; or, as we may perhaps more accurately
state it — since man is always in a sense both conscious
and self-conscious — a schism between man's immediate
experience and the reflexion in which he is involved
whenever he attempts to understand himself. And
instead of a fides qucicrens intellectum , a faith which
is simply the first direct grasp of the soul at truth,
and which therefore leads on necessarily to the more
adequate comprehension and appreciation of it, we
have, on the one side, a faith that withdraws itself
from criticism by raising a plea against the com-
petence of the critic, and, on the other, a reason
which treats faith as another name for illusion.
Now, it seems to me that we can to some extent
sympathise with the motives of both sides in this
12
THE RELATION OF
old controversy. On the one hand, a faith which
| is not seeking intelligence is a faith which is stunted
(and perverted; for, as we have seen, the very nature
of religion, and especially of the Christian religion,
involves and stimulates reflexion upon the great
issues of life. Hence the attempt to defend
Christianity by questioning the right of the intelli-
gence to criticise it, is suicidal. The bulwark which
it sets up for the defence of religion is also a barrier
in the way of its natural development ; and a
religion which does not develop must soon die.
The faith that does not seek, but shuns and repels
knowledge, is already losing its rational character.
The exclusion of science from the sphere of religion
— meaning, as it does, also the exclusion of religion
from the sphere of science — necessarily loads to its
withdrawal from othor spheres of human life until,
instead of being the key to all other interests,
religion becomes a concern by itself, and, we might
almost say, a private concern of the individual.
On the other hand, it seems difficult to admit the
claim of science at all without making if so absolute
as to leave no room for faith; and that whether
religion be conceived as irrational or as rational.
For while, in the former case, religion is sot aside
and Agnosticism takes its place, in the latter case
it seems as if faith must equally disappear, because
reason provides a complete substitute for it, a
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
13
religio philosophi which is based on a definite
philosophical conception of the nature of God, and
a definite proof of His existence. Thus, if it be
admitted that a scientific interpretation of religion
is possible, it might seem that this interpretation
^must take the place of religion itself; that, if faith
^ean be explained by reason, reason must become
J£he nemesis of faith. Moreover, it is impossible
I that religion can be rationalised without being
jfj/greatly modified ; and if such , a transformation be
//justifiable, how can we regard the first form of
y /religion as more than a temporary and provisional
///scaffolding which has to be removed when the build-
ing is completed ? Thus, to treat the claims of
knowledge as absolute seems fatal to faith ; but, on
the other hand, it is futile to admit the right of
-intelligence to^ examine and criticise up to a certain
^point and no farther. All such compromises between
^reason and faith must break down, because we
rg^ean find no third power beyond both to determine
JJ their respective limits ; while, if we allow either
^reason or faith to determine them, the power which
jdoes so is ipso facto recognised as supreme. In
particular, if reason be limited by anything but
^itself, it is enslaved; it becomes, as the Scholastic
U theologians maintained it should be, the ancilla
(Pfidei ; and the voice of a slave has no authority:
^xtt can add no weight to the word of the master.
14 THE RELATION OF
It is impossible • that religion can receive any
real aid or service from the activity of philoso-
phical reflexion unless such reflexion is absolutely
free. And if it be free, it seems as if it could
recognise no right but its own, as if it must set
aside as irrelevant all beliefs and doctrines which
have arisen independently of its own action, and as
if, in building up its scientific creed, it must clear
the ground of all that occupied it before. Yet, if it
does so, the fate of tho eighteenth century Enlight-
enment, and that of the Agnosticism of the present
day, seem to show that religious belief is likoly to
evaporate in our hands, or to reduce itsolf to some-
thing so vague and empty that it can hardly have
any influence upon the life of man.
I have been trying to put as sharply as possiblo
a dilemma which has greatly exerciser the minds of
men during the last two centuries, and which is still
the source of perplexity to many. On the one hand,
it seems as if religious faith must seek reason, as a
condition of its own life ; and yet that, in seeking
reason, it seeks its own destruction. It must seek
reason: for it is impossible that any real faith can
live without attempting to understand itsolf or develop
its own intellectual content; and when it has once
entered upon this course, it cannot stop short of the
end. If it appeals to reason, to reason it must go.
And if at any point it becomes apprehensive, and
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
15
endeavours to put a stop to the process of reflexion
and criticism, above all if it calls in the aid of
scepticism to defend it against such criticism, it loses
something of its sincerity, its wholeness of heart, and
of the courage and freedom that goes only with such
sincerity. Thus it is driven back upon itself and
deprived of that firm hold upon thought and life
which it formerly possessed. The result is that
religion, which should be the great principle of unity
in human life, becomes the source of the most un-
happy of all its divisions. Or if, again, the other
alternative be adopted, and it is recognised that, in
an age of science, religion, like everything else, must
submit to criticism on pain of losing its moral in-
fluence, it seems as if, at the best, we were inviting
such an idealistic re-interpretation of Christianity as
has been attempted by Kant, by Schelling, and by
Hegel : and then, it is alleged by many, we are
substituting for a religion of the heart and will, a
religion of the intellect that dissolves away all those
personal relations of God and man which constitute
the living power of Christianity. And if this be the
best, what is the worst ? It is that all such attempts
to explain or reconstitute religion upon a new basis
should fail, or, like the Natural Religion of the
eighteenth century, should dissolve away in abstrac-
tion, and leave us with nothing to correspond to
religion except the consciousness that beyond all that
16 THE RELATION OF
we can feel and know there is an infinite unknown,
and that, in short, we ourselves
“are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Now there cannot he any doubt that this is a real
difficulty, which has produced and is now more than
ever producing a division in our life, and ranging us
in opposite ranks, and that not on the ground of any
individual or class prejudice, but on the ground of
what are really the highest interests of man’s in-
tellectual and moral life : setting on the one side
those who feel that the powers of man’s spiritual
nature can be fully drawn out only by a religion
that makes the strongest personal appeal to his will
and affections, and who therefore cling to forms of
belief which they refuse to criticise and try to exempt
from criticism : and setting on the other side those to
whom the most vital of all causes is the cause of
truth and intellectual honesty, and who are there-
fore prepared to accept the results of free enquiry,
even if it should tear away from them everything
they would wish to believe. Nay, this is a division
which everyone who is open to the intellectual in-
fluences of the time must feel in himself, as a
conflict, or apparent conflict, between two claims,
both of which rise out of his own nature. There are
many writings of the last century which might be
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 17
adduced as evidence of the prevalence of such a state
of mind. Thus in reading Mill’s Essays on Religion —
a book which attracted much attention when it was
first published — we can see that the author is con-
tinually asking himself how much he may still believe
and hope, how much of Christianity he may retain
consistently with his scientific integrity. And there
are at the present day numerous writers, like Pro-
fessor James, who maintain that there is a point at
which we have a right, without any other evidence,
to take what we think most desirable for our own
spiritual life as by that very fact sufficiently evidenced
to be true; a point at which, in short, belief may
be safely founded on the ‘ will to believe/ Yet from
this there is only a step to the acceptance of the
principles of Newman’s Grammar of Assent , which
asserts the right — in the general impossibility of find-
ing sufficient evidence for any kind of religious truth
— to treat insufficient evidence as if it were sufficient-
On the other hand, there are many who regard all
such expedients for the establishment or restoration
of faith as more or less refined adaptations of Pascal’s
straightforward counsel : “ II faut s’aMtir ” ; and who,
therefore, think themselves obliged to accept the
conclusion that our advancing knowledge is only
making us more clearly realise the limits of our life
and the impossibility of our discovering either whence
it comes or whither it goes, or what is the unknown
VOL. x, b
18 THE RELATION OF
power that rules it; and that the intense life of
religious faith, in which so much that is great in the
past life of man had its source and spring, was based
upon an illusion, with which, for good or evil, we
must learn henceforth to dispense.
Now, it cannot be denied that much remains to
be done ere such difficulties as these can be solved
or removed. But I think that there is already in
our hands, in the idea of Evolution, a kind of
Eirenicon or means of bringing the opposing sides
nearer to an understanding with each other. In
particular, that idea enables us to throw some new
light upon the relations of the unconscious or unre-
flective to the conscious or reflective life, as stages
or factors in the development of man; and thus, as
it were, to break off the horns of the dilemma of
which we have been speaking — a dilemma which
really arises from their being sharply and abstractly
opposed to each other. For, in the first place, in
the very idea that they are two factors or stages
of one life, it is involved that they are not governed
by two absolutely antagonistic principles, but that
there is an essential link of connexion between
them. Their difference and opposition, however far
it may reach, must ultimately be conceived as
secondary and capable of being explained from their
unity. Their conflict, in short, must be taken as
analogous to the conflict of different members or
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
19
forms of vital activity in one organism, a competition
which in the healthy organism is always subordinated
to co-operation, or at least only ceases to be co-operation
at a lower stage that it may become co-operation at a
higher. It is thus that in organic evolution greater
differentiation of function proves itself to be the
means to deeper integration and more concentrated
unity. And in this unity nothing that was valuable
in the lower stage of life is ultimately sacrificed,
however much the form may be changed.
Applying this to the case before us, we cannot
admit that there is any fatal opposition between the
unconscious or unreflective movement of man’s mind
and that which is conscious and reflective. It is
the same reason that is at work in both, and all
that reflexion can do is to bring to light the pro-
cesses and categories which underlie the unreflective
action of the intelligence, and, in doing so, to make
the use of them more definite and adequate. We
must, therefore, maintain that, though reason may
accidentally become opposed to faith, its ultimate
and healthy action must preserve for us, or restore
to us, all that is valuable in faith. Or, if it
necessarily comes into collision with faith at a
certain stage of development, at a further stage this
antagonism must disappear, or be reduced within
ever narrower limits. Nay, in the long run a
living faith will absorb into itself the elements of
20
THE RELATION OF
the criticism which is directed against it, and grow
by their means into a higher form of religious life.
We are too often disposed to say : Fiat justitia, mat
coelurn , and to forget that justice sustains the
universe, and cannot be the cause of its ruin. And
so we are too apt to think the division of faith
and reason to be incurable, and to suppose that
we must choose the one and reject tho other ;
forgetting that a faith that really springs out of
our rational or spiritual nature, or commends itself
to it, cannot be fundamentally irrational or incap-
able of being explained and defended ; and that
a reason which is unable to find an intelligible
meaning in some of the deepest experiences of
human souls, must be one-sided and imperfectly
developed. Hence, while we cannot deny the relative
opposition of the two forms of spiritual life, and
are indeed obliged to recognise it as one of tho
most potent factors in development, we cannot admit
that it is an absolute opposition.
Nor, again, is it possible to be satisfied with a
conception of progress that has often been advocated
in the last century, by no one more forcibly than
by Thomas Carlyle, the conception of an alternation
of two different eras of human history— an era of
intuition, faith, and unconsciousness, in which the
minds of men are at one with themselves, and work
joyfully and successfully in the service of some idea
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 21
which inspires them, but which they never seek to
question or analyse, and an era of reflexion in
which the “native hue of resolution is sicklied
o’er with the pale cast of thought,” in which faith
grows weak, and the symbols which formerly satisfied
the souls of men, and united them with each other,
are dissected and torn to pieces by scepticism.
Apparently Carlyle has little consolation for those
who are born in such an unhappy age of transition,
except to bid them wait for a new inspiration, a
new imaginative synthesis, which shall set up another
symbol in place of that which has disappeared.
Least of all has he any trust in the reflective in-
telligence, in the work of thought, as capable of
bringing about such a synthesis or substantially
contributing towards it. But a deeper consideration
of the process in question may show, as I have
already indicated, that the two great movements
which constitute it, the movement of unconscious
construction, faith and intuition, and the movement
of reflective analysis and critical reconstruction, are
not essentially opposed, but rather form the necessary
complements of each other in the development of
man’s spiritual life: and that, as it is essential to
faith that it should develop into reason, so the
criticism of faith, as it is a criticism by reason of
its own unconscious products, cannot be ultimately
destructive or merely negative in its effect. Its
22 THE RELATION OF
searching fires may, indeed, burn up much of the
wood, hay, stubble — the perishable adjuncts that
attach themselves to the edifice of human faith
— but they cannot touch the stones of the building,
still less the eternal foundation on which it is
built. I will not conceal my conviction that its
dissolving power must be fatal to many things
which men have thought and still think to bo
bound up with their religious life, but I do not
believe that it will destroy anything that is really
necessary to it. Christianity is not, like some
earlier religions, essentially connected with imagin-
ative symbols, which must lose their hold upon
man’s mind so soon as he is able to distinguish
poetry from prose. It had its origin, as we have
seen, in an ago which was, up to a certain point,
an age of reflexion, and the first movement of its
life was to break away from the local and national
influences of the region in which it was born. It
lived and moved from the beginning in an atmos-
phere of universality, and in spite of the reactionary
influences to which in its further history it was
exposed and which gradually affected its life and
doctrine, it never lost its essentially universal
character. Hence, when its official representatives
had turned it into a system of superstition and
obstruction, its own influences have often inspired
the reformers and revolutionists who attacked and
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
23
overthrew that system. It has thus, we might
say, brought “ not peace but a sword ” into the
life of men, because it would not let them rest
in any partial or inadequate solution of their
difficulties, or in anything short of the ideal of
humanity which it set before them. Such a uni-
versal religion, built upon the idea of the unity
of man with God, and therefore on the conviction
that the universe in which man lives is in its
ultimate meaning and reality a spiritual world,
cannot be justly regarded as a transitory phase
of human development, or as a creation of feeling
and imagination which science and philosophy are
bound ultimately to displace. Whatever may be-
come of the special doctrines in which it has found
its first reflective expression, it contains a kernel
which is essentially rational and which cannot but
gain greater and greater importance the more man’s
spiritual life is developed. It has in it a seed of
ideal truth which is one with man’s mind — the
anima natumliter Christiana of which Tertullian
speaks — and which therefore must grow with its
growth and strengthen with its strength. And
philosophy, in spite, or rather because, of its critical
reaction upon all the products of Christian thought
and life, must in the long run supply one of the
most important of all the agencies by which that
seed is brought to maturity. It must show itself
24 THE RELATION OF
neither as the enemy of religion, nor as a substitute
for it, but as the purest form of its consciousness
of itself, and therefore as the groat means of its
development.
The view of the evolution of religion and of its
relation to theology which I have stated is one that
has been gaining ground in modern philosophy ever
since the time of Leibniz. It occupies an important
place in the theories of all the German idealists
from Kant to Hegel, and in those of many other
writers who have followed in their footsteps “during
the last century. From what has been said above,
it will be seen that the objections brought against
it may be summed up under two heads : they arc
either .the objections of those who would separate
philosophy from life or the objections of those who
would separate life from philosophy.
The former class of objections have not seldom
been urged by recent critics, generally in the in-
terest of religion. If philosophy can explain and
criticise religion, still more if it can in any sense be
said to give it a new and more rational form,
must it not, they ask, set religion aside and
take its place ? In other words, does not such a
reflective interpretation of religion involve the sub-
stitution of the philosophy of religion for religion
itself, and therefore of a mere intellectual process
for an experience which embraces the whole com-
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 25
plex nature of man, feeling, thought, and will? If
so, then the change of form, which philosophical
reflexion brings with it, will involve such a trans-
formation of the whole content of religion as well
as of the attitude of the individual towards it, that
all the vivid interest of immediate religious experi-
ence must die out and leave in its place a mere caput
mortuum of abstraction or a dialectical movement
of thought, which are as far removed from life as
the conceptions of pure mathematics.
Such a view, however, involves an entire misconcep-
tion of the work of philosophy and its relation to life.
To say that a religion must develop into a theology
does not mean that theology as a system of thought
must take the place of religion. It was a fatal
inversion of the true order of spiritual things, when
doctrines as to the nature of God were treated by
so-called Natural Religion as the basis of the religious
life, instead of being regarded as the results of an
effort to interpret it. Philosophy, if we separate
it from life, can never be a substitute for life ; it
is only life brought to self-consciousness ; and to
say that it is higher than the other forms of life
is either untrue, or true only in a sense to which
no reasonable objection can be taken. It is true
only in the sense that a religion which understands
itself, which has reflected on the principles on which
it is based, is an advance upon a religion that
26
THE RELATION OF
has not so reflected. Rut theology no more gives us
a new religion than the science of ethics gives us a
new morality. Under limitations shortly to be stated,
they cannot do so, and if they did, they would be
worse than useless. They would be carrying us to
another life and another experience, when what we
want is to explain the life we are actually leading and
the experiences we are having here and now. They
would be liable to all the objections of those who
say that the philosopher builds up a purely ideal
world ‘out of his own head.’ If any philosopher
ever did so, he might justly be loft as its solo
inhabitant. The only truth in the objection is that
— while it is the business of philosophy simply to
explain experience, and among other things to
explain the religion and morality that exist and
not any other — yet it is inevitable that our ethical
and religious attitude should be greatly changed by
our attaining to a reflective consciousness of the prin-
ciples which we had before been using without
reflexion. Ethics docs not, and cannot produce a
morality which is essentially different from the
morality of immediate experience, the morality ex-
isting in the intuitive vision of good men, who live
up to the highest standard of their time, and in
living up to it carry it a step higher. Yet it is
true to say that reflexion contributes to moral pro-
gress. If, for example, we reflect on the order of
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY
27
the State and bring to light the principle that
dominates its activities, the unity that pervades
and connects its dispersed rules and institutions,
the State .becomes in a sense a new thing for us.
The consciousness of the meaning of our life must
react upon the life itself and conduce to its im-
provement by liberating the political idea from the
accidents of its temporary embodiment. And so it
is with religion. As reflexion advances, it leads to
a distinction which is continually growing clearer,
between that which is accidental and of temporary
value and that which is essential and fruitful for
all time; and this in turn must bring about a
further development of the latter at the expense
of the former. Thus as man’s progress, in one
important aspect of it, is a progress to self-con-
sciousness, he is in some sense a new man when
he has gained a new consciousness of himself. But
it would be repeating the central mistake of the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to separate
speculation from life and to make it a substitute
for the experience from which it springs. The main
practical use of philosophy is to prune away the
accretions of time, to counteract the tendency to
stereotype or fossilise particular forms of life and
thought, and so to give room for the further growth
of the spirit of man. Philosophy is the criticism of
life, and to separate it from life or substitute it for
28 THE RELATION OF
life, would be like attributing to the gardener what
is due to the vital forces of the plant. The metaphor,
indeed, fails to be adequate, but it fails in a way
that tends further to emphasise the principle illus-
trated by it. For the philosophy that criticises life
is an element in the life it criticises, and the treat-
ment of it as something independent, something that
sets up claims for itself, must end in depriving it of
its raison d’etre and making it barren and unfruitful.
On the other hand, if it be an error to attempt
to separate philosophy, as the criticism of life, from
life itself, it is an equal error to attempt to separate
life from philosophy. There is a litoral truth in
the saying of Socrates, that “ a life without criticism
is not worthy of being lived by men”; and even
that, strictly speaking, it cannot bo lived by them.
As I have already attempted to show, the critical
reaction of the human mind upon experience begins
almost as soon as the experience itself. Least of
all is it possible to separate man’s highest life, his
religious experience, from such a critical reaction;
and in this sense theology begins to exist as soon
as religion has taken any definite form. At the
same time it is true that the criticism does not
separate itself from the thing criticisod till a
comparatively late stage of human history. It
works rather as a silent transforming influence,
modifying and improving the beliefs of men or
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 29
gradually making one belief obsolete and causing
another to triumph over it.
Looking at it from this point of view, therefore, we
may fairly say that the beginning of theology is to
be found in Greek philosophy; for it was in Greece
that reflexion first became free, and at the same time
systematic. It was in Greece that philosophy first
organised itself as a relatively separate interest, over
against the immediate practical interests of life. Philo-
sophy, indeed, cannot detach itself from life; in so
far as it does so, it must be smitten with barrenness.
Its office is to bring life to clear self-consciousness,
and because Greek philosophy did this, it acquired
and maintained a relative independence. And it
is this that gives primary importance to its con-
tribution to theology. There is, it is true, a
theological philosophy of India, which is earlier in
development than Greek philosophy ; but the thought
of India, though often subtle and profound, is un-
methodical ; and when it goes beyond the most
abstract ideas it mixes the forms of im agination
with those of religion in a way that does not con-
duce to distinct and adequate thinking. And, while
it is not easy to ascertain what elements it has
contributed to Western theology, it may safely
be asserted that its influence was secondary and
subordinate. Even in the Neoplatonic philosophy,
which is most kindred in spirit with it, the likeness
30 RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
is mainly at least the result of the independent
development of Greek speculation. It was the
thought of Greece which, in this as in other de-
partments, gave to the philosophical enquiries of
Christendom a definite method and a definite aim.
It was from Greece that the Fathers of the Church
borrowed the forms of thought, the fundamental
conceptions of nature and human life, in short,
all the general presuppositions which they brought
to the interpretation of the Christian faith. Hence
it is hardly possible to trace with intelligence the
evolution of doctrines either in the early or medieval
Church, or in modern times, without a previous
study of the development of theology in the Greek
philosophers.
LECTURE SECOND,
STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY,
In the last lecture I said that Theology begins in
Greece, or at least that it is not necessary to trace
it farther hack; for it is there that we find philo-
sophical reflexion, upon religion as upon other subjects,
for the first time distinctly emancipating itself from
sensuous images, and attempting to define its objects
by their essential nature and relations to each other.
Theology is' religion brought to self-consciousness. It
is the reflective analysis of the consciousness of God in
its distinctive form, and in its connexion with all our
other consciousness of reality. In this technical sense
the word Theology first appears in Aristotle, as a
name for what was afterwards called Metaphysic, the
science which seeks to discover and exhibit the funda-
mental principles of Being and Knowing, and which
therefore finds its ultimate object in God. But, while
the word is not found before Aristotle , 1 the thing itself
1 The word 4 theologian * occurs in Plato, but only in the sense
of a mythologist.
32 STAGES IN THE
already exists in its full development in Plato, who,
for good or evil, is deeply imbued with the theo-
logical spirit, and might, indeed, justly bo called the
first systematic theologian. In other words, he is
the first philosopher who grasped the idea that lies at
the root of all religion, and made it the centre of
his whole view of the universe.
Now, that which underlies all forms of religion,
from the highest to the lowest, is the idea of God
as an absolute power or principle. For, as I have
attempted to show elsewhere , 1 the religious conscious-
ness, in its essential meaning, is the consciousness of
a Being who embraces all our life and gives unity
and direction to it, who lifts us above ourselves and
binds our limited and transitory existence to the
eternal. It is the consciousness that all our finite ex-
perience presupposes and rests upon a principle which
comprehends all its various contents and transcends
all its differences. It is, finally, the consciousness
that, beyond all the objects wo perceive without us,
and beyond all die states and activities of the self
within us, there is a unity which manifests itself in
both, and from which neither can be separated.
Now, such a consciousness is not an arbitrary product
of circumstances ; it is a necessary condition of the
development of the mind of man, an experience which,
in some form or other, man must make as lie comes
1 The Evolution of Religion ; ace especially I, Loot. 8*
34
STAGES IN THE
Now, if this be the real or ultimate meaning of
religion, as I have attempted elsewhere to show,
we are obliged to draw a marked contrast between
the religious and the profane or secular consciousness.
The secular consciousness — i.e. our ordinary unre-
flective consciousness of ourselves and the world —
starts from the division and separation of things;
it takes them all, so to speak, as independent sub-
stances which might exist by themselves, and whose
relations to each other are external and accidental.
It deals primarily with the finite, with the manifold
forms of existence which limit, and are limited by each
other in space and time ; or, if it risos to the eternal
and infinite, it is only as to something beyond and
far away — something that is not present in experience,
but which the limitations and imperfections of ex-
perience make us suspect or aspire to, a transcendent
something, which we can neither name nor define
except as the opposite of the finite. The religious
consciousness is the direct antithesis of this way
of thinking. It, so to speak, turns the tables upon
the whole secular system of thought, beginning whore
it ends and ending where it begins, “burning what
it adores and adoring what it burns,” denying or
treating as phenomenal and illusive what it regards
as most real and certain, and regarding as the first
principle of knowledge and reality what to it is the
vaguest of abstractions. Irx other words, the first
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 35
concern of religion is not with the difference of
things from each other, and from the subject that
knows them, but with the unity that underlies all
these differences. It demands that we should not
regard the whole as the sum of the parts or particular
existences presented to us one by one in our ordinary
experience, but rather that we should regard the parts
as having a dependent and derived life, which cannot
for one moment be severed from the life of the
whole, or from the principle of reality which reveals
itself therein. If, therefore, it does not deny all reality
or independence to the finite, yet it looks first
and last to God as the unity from which all comes,
to which all tends, and in which all is contained. In
its conception of things it takes its stand not at
the point of view of any one of them, but at the
point of view of the universal principle, in relation
to which they are and are known. The language
of the natural man — if we may use that expression
for the man whose thoughts and feelings are least
influenced by religion — would be something like this :
“ I know most surely and certainly the things which
I can see and handle, the outward objects I apprehend
through my senses; I also know, in a way, the self within
me — though about the soul or self there is something
dark and mysterious whenever I try to realise its
nature as other, and yet not other, than the body.
But when I seek to rise above myself and the objects
36 STAGES IN THE
I perceive, and to think of a Being who is neither
the one nor the other, and yet somehow is the source
and end of both, I seem to lose all solid basis either
for knowledge or belief, and to be trying to give
substance to a dream.” On the other hand, the
language of the man who looks at the world with
the eyes of religion must rather be something like-_
this: “I may be deceived, and am often deceived,
as to the things without me, which at best are
ever passing and changing. Of the self within me
I have a more stable consciousness, as bound up
with all that I know or feel, and as the source of
a moral ideal which 1 cannot but regard as absolute ;
but even the self seems to escape me when 1 think
of the limits of my earthly existence and of tho rapid
alternations of my thoughts and feelings. Of one
thing, however, I am sure, of the abiding presence
and reality that holds together all tho shifting phases
of the outer and the inner life, of the all-embracing,
all-sustaining unity in which I and all things ‘live
and move and have our being.’ Though all else
should fail me, I am certain of God.” The religious
consciousness, therefore, overturns all ordinary
standards of value, and sets up a now standard in
their place, a standard derived, not from any one
finite existence or end, but from the relation of
all finite existences and ends to the infinite. For,
if the thought of God be admitted at all, it must claim
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
37
everything for itself, and can leave nothing for Caesar
or for any other power. It cannot but demand that
we should both understand and estimate everything
else in relation to it, that all our knowledge of the
universe should ultimately be brought to a focus
in the knowledge of God, and that all the objects
of our will should be valued only as means to the
realisation of God in the world.
Now, it may be said, in objection' to this view, that
such a complete religious inversion of our ordinary
consciousness of reality, such a 4 transvaluation of
all values ’ in the light of the infinite, goes very
far beyond what we find in many religions, and
that, indeed, it is a rare phenomenon even in the
highest religion we know. In many religions God
seems hardly to be regarded as an absolute being
at all, but rather to be identified with some finite
object or objects, or at least with some such object
idealised, transfigured and lifted by imagination above
the ordinary levels of finitude. And even when a
more spiritual conception of divinity is attained,
yet the relation of the individual to his God often
takes a form which seems greatly to fall short of any
such consciousness as I have described. It seems to
be rather the relation of weak creatures to one
who is far stronger than they, and from whom,
therefore, they have much to hope and to fear — a
relation which, even when it takes the form of
38 STAGES IN THE
admiration and love, is still analogous to the
dependence of one finite being upon another, and
not the unique consciousness in a finite creature
of his union with the Infinite, in whom he loses, and
in whom alone he can find himself.
Such objections can be met, in the first place, by
showing that the religious consciousness, as the con-
sciousness of the whole to which we belong, and of the
supreme reality of the principle of unity in that whole,
is involved in all our consciousness of the universe and
of ourselves : and in the second place, that this prin-
ciple, though involved in all our thought and activity,
is for that very reason the last to be clearly appre-
hended by us. Aristotle’s assertion that that which
is first in nature is last in time, has its highest
exemplification here. In the history of man religion
does not at first reveal itself in that which is its
true or adequate form. It represents God purely
as an object or purely as a subject, as manifesting
Himself purely without, or again purely within us,
before it rises to the consciousness of God as God,
the one principle of all knowledge and reality.
Yet, even from an early period the true idea is
silently working under the imperfect forms of its
expression, and giving indications of itself in many
ways, especially in the language of worship ; for,
under the sway of religious emotion, the individual
is often carried beyond the limits of his ordinary
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
39
thought. And the whole history of the evolution
of religion is a record of the process whereby it
gradually reveals what was latent in it from the
beginning and finds ever better ways of represent-
ing its object, and whereby these again react in
producing a truer relation of the individual to that
object, as the principle of his own life and of the
life of all things.
Such considerations — which I have dealt with more
fully in another course of lectures 1 — may be sufficient
to meet the difficulty of recognising in the various
forms of religion what I have asserted to be the
principle that underlies them all, and is more or less
distinctly expressed in every one of them. Here,
however, we have to deal not with religion but
with theology, the science or philosophy of religion.
And theology, as we have seen, is just religion
brought to self-consciousness, and endeavouring
reflectively to criticise and interpret its own uncon-
scious processes. Theology begins, therefore, as soon
as the immediate process of religious life, the direct
movement by which our minds rise to the conscious-
ness of God, ceases to be sufficient for itself. In other
words, it begins when the mind turns back upon
itself to question the results of its own spontaneous
activity. Here, as elsewhere, science arises in doubt,
a doubt which makes the mind retrace in reflective
1 The Evolution of Religion , T, Lect. 7.
40
STAGES IN THE
thought the path in which it has been led by its
first imaginative intuitions of truth, and ask whether
it can justify in whole or in part the results at
which it has arrived. And the question thus raised
is one that brings with it more searching of heart
than any other which arises in the transition from
intuition to reflexion, from the ordinary consciousness
to science. For religion does not affect merely one
aspect of life or one department of things. A man's
real religion, whatever ho may profess, is the sunimed-
up product of ail his experience, the ultimate attitude
of thought and feeling and will, into which he is
thrown by his intercourse with the world. And
though this attitude of mind is, in the main, due
to the working of what we call unconscious
reason, yet the whole nature of man as a rational
being comes into play in producing it. Hence the
awaking of conscious reason to sift and criticise
religion, must bring with it a more serious disturb-
ance of the existence of man than any other critical
reaction of thought upon life. It must give rise to
a movement of doubt and denial, and ultimately to
a sifting process which, even if it restores the funda-
mental principles of earlier faith, yet inevitably
makes great changes in its form, and rejects so
much that had formerly seemed essential, that some-
times it is difficult to detect the identity which
maintains itself through the change.
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 41
Now, this remark has a special application to the
development of theology in Greece. The religion
of Greece, indeed, especially in its later human-
ised polytheism, marks a great advance in the
spiritual history of man, a higher appreciation both
of his own nature and of his relations to the
world than can be discerned in earlier religions.
Greek mythology, as it appears in Homer, in Pindar,
and in the Tragedians, already shows the same
freedom of spirit, the same large outlook upon the
facts of human life and destiny, which at a later time
manifested itself in the speculations of its philoso-
phers. The Greek poets, indeed, wielded their imagin-
ative symbols so freely, as a means of expressing all
their thoughts and feelings, that the mythology they
created or remoulded is like a collection of transparent
allegories, through which spiritual truth is con-
veyed; and it was but a short step for the philo-
sophers who came after them, to drop the symbols
altogether and adopt the abstract language of
thought. At the same time the imaginative form
of Greek mythology exposed it in a peculiar way to
the attacks of scepticism, so soon as the intellect
of Greece had awakened to the distinction of poetry
from prose. The delicate moonlit web of poetic
fiction which the Greek imagination had woven
around the crude naturalism of pre-historic religion,
insensibly softening, colouring, and idealising it, could
42
STAGES IN THE
not maintain itself in the daylight of a critical
age. Hence, at least in all the educated classes,
there was a rapid collapse of faith ; and philosophy
seemed to have had thrown upon it the task, not only
of interpreting religion, but, as it were, of provid-
ing a new religion out of itself. Bacon declares
that with the ancients moral philosophy took the
place of theology : he should rather have said that
it tried to supply the want caused by the failure
of popular religion. Indeed, the greatest of all the
differences between the religious development of
G-reece and that of Christendom lies just in this, that,
in the former philosophy at once breaks away from
the tutelage of faith and asserts its independence,
nay, claims to provide the only true basis on which
bhe moral and spiritual life can be supported ;
whereas, in the latter, there is a long period during
which philosophy remains strictly the concilia fidei ;
md when it emancipates itself, it cannot be said,
sven with those who are most influenced by philoso-
phical reflexion, to substitute itself for the religion
faith, but only to seek a rational basis for it,
md to subject it to a sifting criticism.
A consideration of these facts enables us to make
i preliminary division of the field which a complete
listory of theology would have to traverse, and
'0 distinguish three main periods in that history,
lamely, the period of Greek and Koman antiquity,
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
43
the Christian era down to the Reformation, and the
modern period. In these lectures I shall confine
myself almost entirely to the first of those periods ;
but it may do something to put our enquiries in
their proper setting if we begin by sketching out,
in however imperfect a way, the whole field of
investigation.
In the first period, the period of Greek and Roman
antiquity, philosophy is almost absolutely free, hardly
even troubled by any counter-claim of authority, in
its attempts to discover the nature of things and of
the Being in whom all reality centres. The poetic
conceptions of early religion could not, as I have
said, stand for a moment the shock of criticism.
Sometimes, indeed, we find early philosophers treating
mythology as an allegory of the higher truth which
is expressed in their own doctrine, while at other
times they attacked it as untrue, or set it aside
as irrelevant. Seldom or never do we find them
treating it as having any value in itself. And
if Plato recognises that some other kind of
teaching than that given by philosophy is neces-
sary for men in the earlier stage of their intel-
lectual and moral education — necessary for all in
whom the power of philosophical reflexion has
not been, or cannot be developed — yet he regards
the actual mythology as altogether unfit for
such a purpose, and looks for the creation of a
44
STAGES IN THE
purified body of myths which should convey a
better ethical lesson. And, on the other side,
closely as religion was bound up with the political
life of Greece, wo hear of very few attempts to
interfere with the freedom of speculation to
criticise and refute it. The attack made upon
Anaxagoras for the impiety of his physical theories
was really aimed at Pericles, whose friend he was.
And Socrates is the only martyr of philosophy in
the ancient world, the only man who can be said
to have suffered for the freedom of thought. After
his time philosophy became the natural refuge of
all those whose spiritual needs could not ho satis-
fied by the decaying superstitions of the ancient
world. The decline of that independent political
life of cities, with which the religion of Greece
had been so closely connected, deprived that religion
of half its meaning ; and under the empire of
Eome the educated classes in ever-increasing
numbers found moral support and guidance in the
teaching of one or other of the philosophical schools.
It is true that to a certain extent the Stoics, and to
a still greater extent the Neo~ Platon is is, endeavoured
by an allegorising method to revive in some degree
the life of mythology, and oven to find some rational
meaning in the ritual and ceremony of popular
religion. And there were some in later times,
among whom the most celebrated is the Emperor
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
45
Julian, who took seriously this curious amalgam
of philosophy and superstition. But, at the most,
it could only be said that philosophy patronised
the popular religion, and not that it formed a real
alliance with it, still less paid to it any real
deference.
It may then safely be said that ancient philo-
sophy was, at once and almost without effort, free.
If it owed much to the religion from which it
emerged, it was hardly at all conscious of the debt.
And perhaps its imperfection was partly due to the
very ease with which it won its freedom. In spiri-
tual things the greatness of the price we pay, has
much to do with the value of the good we acquire.
And one consequence of the facility with which criti-
cism disposed of the primitive faiths of the ancient
world was, that the purely intellectual life, the life
of philosophical reflexion, tended too much to with-
draw upon itself and to disconnect itself from the
life of feeling and impulse, to break away, in short,
from the unconscious basis out of which the life of
consciousness arises. This exaltation of conscious as
opposed to unconscious reason begins with Socrates,
who in teaching that f virtue is knowledge 5 seemed
to cast contempt on any virtue which is not the
product of distinct reflexion upon the ends of human
existence, any virtue that depends upon rule and
habit, or upon the influence of society in drawing
46
STAGES IN THE
out and disciplining the moral energies of man.
And though, as we shall see, this defect was partly
corrected by Plato and Aristotle, who laid increasing
weight upon habit and social training, yet these great
writers repeated the same error in a more dangerous
form, when they exalted the intellectual above the
practical life, and treated the former as that in
which alone man could be said to rise into unity
with the divine. Against this undue exaltation of
the intellect there is a partial reaction in the later
schools of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, in
which the guidance of practical life again becomes
the great object of philosophy. Tut this change is
less important than it seems. Eor in these schools
ethics was almost entirely divorced from tho
wider social interests with which in earlier times
it had been concerned, and confined to a con-
sideration of the ways in which the inner inde-
pendence and harmony of the individual soul might
be maintained. The Roman Empire, while estab-
lishing outward order and organisation of life among
all the races submitted to its rule, had exorcised
a disintegrating influence upon all tho social and
political bonds that had hitherto held them together.
And philosophy could only accept the result and
endeavour to fortify tho individual man in his isola-
tion, and to bestow upon him that strength of heart
and moral self-sulliciency of which ho was in need.
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
47
Hence, even more than Socrates, the Stoics and
Epicureans tend to concentrate attention upon the
inner life, as a sphere to be regulated by con-
scious reason and deliberate purpose ; and they
show even less respect than he did for the move-
ments of natural feeling and immediate impulse.
Their philosophical religion is a creation of
abstract thought which hardly attempts to connect
itself with experience, or to find any interpretation
of it. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius live in an
ideal world, which they hold, indeed, to be the
only reality, but which they hardly attempt to
bring into any rational connexion with the facts of
their external lives. They are optimists, who yet
take an almost pessimistic view of the actual con-
ditions of existence in which they find themselves.
Their philosophy is rather a refuge from the con-
fusion and evil they see around them than a means
of removing the appearance of confusion by throwing
upon it the light of a higher truth. They seek
not to overcome the world but to make themselves
indifferent to it. And with the Neo-Platonists, the
last of the Greek schools of philosophy, this tendency
to withdraw from life and all its problems becomes
still more marked. The higher claims of contempla^
tion, which had been asserted by Plato and Aristotle
are again put forward and in a still more exclusive
sense; for while Plato and Aristotle sought to bring
48 STAGES IN THE
all nature and all the interests of human life within
the scope of philosophy, and had made theology only
the culminating phase of science which brings all
its varied results to a final unity, with the Neo-
Platonists this unity becomes in itself the main and,
we might almost say, the sole object of interest.
Thus theology, absorbing the whole life of philo-
sophy, is emptied of its contents, or rather has for
its whole content the bare idea of religion. That
idea, indeed, is expressed in Plotinus with a depth
and comprehensiveness which has hardly anywhere
else been equalled ; but we might perhaps say that
with him the idea swallows up the reality. Man
is left, as it were, alone with God, without any
world to mediate between them, and in the ecstatic
vision of the Absolute the light of reason is extin-
guished.
It appears, then, that in ancient philosophy thought
is free ; but, as it did not pay ‘ a great price J for its
freedom, as it gained that freedom without any hard
struggle with faith and social authority, its emancipa-
tion made it lose hold of reality. It tended in the
end to an exclusive intellectualism, in which the form
of thought was opposed to the matter, and the actual
world was not idealised or spiritualised, but rather
condemned as unideal and unspiritual Nevertheless, 1
the debt of philosophy and theology to Greek thought
is incalculable. It first distinctly lifted man above
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
49
vague wonder at a universe he could not comprehend,
and gave him courage to define and to measure, to
distinguish and to relate, all the forms of his inward
and outward life. It first made him ask distinct
questions of experience, and taught him the methods
by which he could hope to answer them. It first
attempted to name and to determine the categories
or forms of thought under which we have to bring all
things, if we would seek to understand their nature
and to exhibit their relations to each other. Finally —
what is most important in relation to our subject —
it first sought to grasp and verify that idea of the
ultimate unity of all things, which lies at the basis of
all religion. It thus laid down the indispensable pre-
suppositions of all later theological thought, and
developed that flexible language of reflexion in which
alone its ideal relations could be expressed. If the
Boman empire, by the peace which its organised rule
secured, the pads Romanae majestas , provided the
external conditions under which Christianity could
advance to the conquest of civilised mankind, the
philosophy of Greece provided the inward conditions
whereby its ideas could be interpreted and brought
into that systematic form which was necessary to
secure their permanent influence upon the human
mind.
The second stage in the evolution of theology is
that in which the conceptions and methods of Greek
VOL. i. D
50
STAGES IN THE
philosophy were used to formulate and interpret the
new ideas as to the nature of God and man and their
relations to each other, which were involved in, or
suggested by, the facts of the life of Christ and the
spiritual experiences of His followers. To a certain
extent the two stages overlap one another; for Chris-
tianity had begun to be developed into a dogmatic
system long before Neoplatonic thought had received
its culminating expression in Plotinus. The charac-
teristic attitude of theology during this whole period
is directly the reverse of that which had prevailed
during the first period; for whereas in the first
period philosophical reflexion was hardly conscious of
limitation by any authority, and had not in any way
to yield to the immediate claims of the religious con-
sciousness, in the whole period of the evolution of
Christian doctrine down to the Reformation philosophy
is in a strictly subordinate position. In the early
Christian centuries its influence is very great, and,
indeed, can hardly be exaggerated; but it was not
recognised. The Fathers did not seem to themselves
to he actively developing a system of doctrine, but
simply to be handing down the faith once delivered
to the saints; and, though in the Scholastic period
philosophy was recognised to have a place of its own,
it was strictly that of an instrument to analyse and
explain doctrines winch were accepted as true on the
authority of the Church. While, therefore, there is
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
51
a real evolution of doctrine, involving great activity
of thought and many changes in the interpretation
of the fundamental ideas of Christianity, the pre-
vailing view of theologians was that they were simply
maintaining an immovable truth; and that, if they
had made any alteration in its expression, it was
merely of a formal kind, which had no effect upon the 1
substance of the faith. Only once, in the Alexandrian
school of theologians, did philosophical reflexion gain
a certain independence, and even claim to be a higher
way of apprehending the truth; but this was a passing
phase in the early history of the Church.
The result of this process was that each doctrine,
as it established itself as one of the articles of
faith, tended to become fixed and fossilised, and
ceased to have the power of growth; and the new
life of thought seemed rather to transfer itself
to fresh questions than to deepen and reinterpret
the results already attained. Hence, though we can
trace a rational process of development and a real
movement of intelligence in the successive steps by
which Christianity defined itself, yet this is disguised
and to a great extent deprived of its value by the
mode in which it took place. For, on the one hand,
reason can never show its real power in servitude, or
when its weapons are used by those who are not fully
conscious of their nature. The conceptions of Plato
and Aristotle, of the Stoics and Neo-Platonists, as
52
STAGES IN THE
employed by those in whom the genuine life of Greek
thought was no longer present and who could not
criticise the ideas they were using, wore often com-
bined in an external and mechanical way with the
data supplied by Christian life and experience. And,
on the other hand, it has to be remembered that these
conceptions themselves contained elements that were
essentially alien and even hostile to the matter to
which they were applied. Tho consequence was that
the movement of theological thought became more
forced, unnatural, and fictitious tho farther it ad-
vanced, till it ended in the production of the great
Scholastic systems— systems in which compromise and
balance take the place of organic unity, and arguments
for foregone conclusions are substituted for scientific
lor philosophical investigation. Scholastic theology
i really deserves the character which Mommsen has
attributed to all theology: it is “the bastard child
of faith and reason.” It is tho extreme manifestation
at once of the slavery of reason and of tho necessary
recoil of reason against that which has enslaved it.
The effort to confine the intelligence to the task
of analysing data which it is not allowed to examine,
and of arguing from premises which it may not ques-
tion, could only end in making it rationalistic, scep-
tical, and even destructive. And tho Scholastic, while
seeming to himself only to be analysing the doctrine
of Christianity, really dissected it, and turned it from
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
53
a living truth into a dead body of dogma. Finally, the
Nominalism of the age before the Reformation practi-
cally showed that the Scholastic method was fatal
to a Christian, and even to a religious view of life,
and made it necessary in the interest of philosophy
and theology itself that the long divorce of faith and
reason should come to an end.
What we find, then, in this second period of the
history of theology is an external combination of re-
ligion with philosophy, and the production of a system
of dogma in which the ideas and methods evolved by
the free speculation of Greece were used to express
and interpret the new principle of Christianity* But
the results of such an artificial process, in which the
form of thought was derived from one source and the
matter from another, were necessarily very inade-
quate, and could have only a provisional value. It
was inevitable in the long run that the reflective
power, called forth by this imperfect attempt to
work out the consequences of the new view of life,
should turn against its own products. It was in-
evitable that modern philosophy, which had grown
to maturity under the tutelage of the Church,
should reassert the ancient freedom of Greek
speculation, and again endeavour to interpret for
itself the widening experience of humanity. And
this movement of renewal and revival, or, as it is
called, Benaissance , soon extended also to religious
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
53
a living truth into a dead body of dogma. Finally, the
Nominalism of the age before the Reformation practi-
cally showed that the Scholastic method was fatal
to a Christian, and even to a religious view of life,
and made it necessary in the interest of philosophy
and theology itself that the long divorce of faith and
reason should come to an end.
What we find, then, in this second period of the
history of theology is an external combination of re-
ligion with philosophy, and the production of a system
of dogma in which the ideas and methods evolved by
the free speculation of Greece were used to express
and interpret the new principle of Christianity. But
the results of such an artificial process, in which the
form of thought was derived from one source and the
matter from another, were necessarily very inade-
quate, and could have only a provisional value. It
was inevitable in the long run that the reflective
power, called forth by this imperfect attempt to
work out the consequences of the new view of life,
should turn against its own products. It was in-
evitable that modern philosophy, which had grown
to maturity under the tutelage of the Church,
should reassert the ancient freedom of Greek
speculation, and again endeavour to interpret for
itself the widening experience of humanity. And
this movement of renewal and revival, or, as it is
called, Renaissance, soon extended also to religious
54
STAGES IN THE
experience, when the Reformers, setting aside the
whole system of thought and life which the medieval
Church had built upon the foundation of Christianity,
tried to put themselves again in direct contact with
the life and teaching of Christ.
The Reformation, indeed, was far from being, in
the first instance, an assertion of those claims of
reason which Scholasticism had discredited ; but it
contained the germ of a reconciliation between the two
factors of man’s life, which in the medieval Church
had been opposed to each other; for it demanded
a faith which should not be the acceptance of the
dictates of an outward authority, but the spiritual
apprehension of Christianity by each man for himself.
Such a faith was really, what a faith in aiithority
could never become, a Jules (juaerens intdketum , a faith
that had in itself the necessity of its own development
into reason. And when Descartes put forward his
maxim : De omnibus dubitandum est y and sought to
restore philosophy to its rights, as an investigation
into truth without any presuppositions, ho was really
proclaiming that the era of compromise* — of the blend-
ing of incongruous elements derived from different
sources, or of an external truce between opposite prin-
ciples — was at an end ; and that the form and matter
of thought must henceforth ho derived from the same
source, and brought into complete unity with each
other. Hence modern philosophy, and the theology
55
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
or view of 1 the highest things,’ in which it culminates,
is, like Greek philosophy, free speculation. It deals
with religion, as it deals with the other experiences
of life, which it tries with perfect impartiality and
disinterestedness to interpret. And when any attempt
has been made to limit its freedom, it has reasserted
itself in a sceptical and even a revolutionary spirit
against all dogma whatsoever, and even ag ains t
Christianity itself, so far as it was identified with
dogma.
It could not, however, permanently retain such a
merely negative attitude. Nor could it fall back upon
that indifference to popular religion, which was the
general characteristic of the Greek philosophers. It
found itself in the presence of a religious experience,
which had a far richer content than that of the
Greeks, and it was forced to seek for some exp lana tion
of that experience. It had to deal with a religion
which was not bound up with the peculiarities of any
special age or nation, but which from the first has
breathed the atmosphere of universality — a religion
which found its immediate expression, not in a fanci-
ful mythology, but in a life lived under human
conditions and carried through suffering and death
to a spiritual triumph. It could not escape into
abstraction from the influence of this great fact,
and of all the experiences to which in the history
of humanity it has given rise. Nor could it hope
56
STAGES IN THE
to discover the ultimate reality of tilings by with-
drawing into the inner life, or by losing all the
manifold forms of existence, like Plotinus, in a
mystic unity. It was committed to the hard task
of idealising a world which in its first aspect seems
to know nothing of the ideal; of taking away the
commonness of life by the power of a more compre-
hensive vision, and finding the key to its discords in
a harmony which realises itself through them. It
had to seek the essential means for the realisation
of its ideal in that very chanco and contingency
of life, which the greatest of ancient philosophers
regarded as inexplicable, or as the result of that ex-
ternal necessity which clings to all finite existence. In
Christianity we might say that religion was for the
first time brought face to face with the whole problem
of the world in its vastness and universality, and at the
same time in all its complexity of individual concrete
detail. It had to idealise life and death, and in a
certain sense even sin and evil, and to attain to a
more real optimism through the lowest depths ever
fathomed by pessimism. And philosophical reflexion
upon such a religion was hound to follow in its foot-
steps, to face the same difficulties, and find by its own
methods a way to the same or to a hotter solution
of them. lienee modern philosophy, though in its
earlier stages— in the effort to assort its own free-
dom and to establish the first basis of an intelligible
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY
57
view of the universe— it tended rather to withdraw
from the whole sphere of religious thought, and even
to regard it with hostility, has been obliged by
the necessity of its own development more and more
definitely to take cognisance of the Christian system
of thought and life. It has been obliged to consider
whether in its own way and by its own methods it
can reinterpret and justify the thorough-going and
fearless idealism and optimism of the founder of
Christianity, while bringing it in relation to the
whole results of modern life and science. This
aspect of its work has gained greater pro min ence
since the days of Kant, in the great speculative
movement which he initiated at the end of the
eighteenth century. And if it be true that during
the course of last century there has been a partial
reaction from the premature attempt then made
to snatch at the fruits of philosophy before they
were quite ripe, I think it may fairly be said that
in its later years, after all the great development
of science, especially of biological and historical
science, there has been a return upon the methods
and principles of idealism which, if it be characterised
by greater caution, is perhaps on that account the
more likely to bring about a permanent result.
LECTURE THIRD.
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO.
In the last lecture I suggested that Plato is (ho
hrst systematic theologian, the iirst philosopher who
distinctly grasped the idea that lies at tho root of
leligion, and used it as the hey to all the other
problems of philosophy. Or, if this statement require
some qualification, we may at least say that ho is
the philosopher to whom all our theology may bo
traced back, and to whom it owes most. Emerson
once said that Plato’s Dialorjnn were tho Bible
of educated men; and if by this ho meant that from
them the reflective consciousness has drawn its
greatest nutriment and support, it is not too much
to say of the writings of one who is the fountain-
head of idealistic, we might oven say of ideal, views
of life, llato has done mote than any other writer
to fill both poetry and philosophy with tho spirit
of religion, to break the yoke of custom and tradition
“heavy as frost and deep almost as life,” which
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
59
cramps the development of man's mind, to liberate
him from the prejudices of the natural understanding,
and to open up to him an ideal world in which
he can find refuge from the narrowness and inadequacy
of life. In the Terrestrial Paradise, on the summit of
the Purgatorial mount, Dante is made to drink of
the waters of Lethe to wash away from his memory
all his earthly cares and sins, and then of the
waters of Eunoe to refresh and strengthen his spirit
for the vision of the heavens. Plato’s writings may
be said to be Lethe and Eunoe in one, at once
the liberation of thought from that which is limited
and temporary, and its initiation into a new ideal
way of conceiving the world. To put it more
directly, Plato is the source of two great streams of
theological thought which have flowed through all
the subsequent literature of religion down to the
present time. On the one hand, we may find in
him the source, or at least one of the sources, of
that spirit of mysticism which seeks to merge the
particular in the universal, the temporal in the
eternal, and ultimately to lose the intelligible world
and the intelligence in an absolute divine unity ; a
spirit which, through the Neo-Platonists, has exercised
a very powerful influence upon the thought of
Christendom, sometimes deepening and elevating it,
though, on the whole, tending to give it a false
Hirpptirm Pnt P1a.tr> iff also the main source of that
60 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
idealism which is the best corrective of mysticism,
the idealism which seeks not merely to get away
from the temporal and the finite, but to make
them intelligible; not to escape from immediate
experience into an ideal world in comparison with
which it is a shadow and a dream, but to find the
ideal in the world of experience itself, underlying
it, and giving a new meaning to all its pheno-
mena. These two tendencies conflict in Plato, as
in subsequent philosophy and theology, and if we
cannot say that in his writings their conflict comes
to a definite issue, or results in the final victory
of the more comprehensive view, yet tho very
statement of the alternative was of immense import-
ance in the history of religious thought, and makes
the study of Plato essential to any one who would
understand its development.
There is always an element of illusion in the
attempt to sum up the thought of a great writor
in a few words of definition. But I may give a
succinct view of Plato’s work, and at tho same timo
prepare the way for a more detailed statement, if
I say that there are two principles or tendencies
the union or coalescence of which givos its dis-
tinctive character to tho Platonic philosophy. In
the first place, his thought is always moving from
the particular to tho universal, from the part to tho
whole; ho is constantly endeavouring to show the
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO 61
relative and illusive nature of the former as separated
from the latter, and to reach a principle of unity
deeper than all the differences of thought and things,
a principle on which they depend and in relation to
which alone they can be understood. And, in the
second place, he is bent on establishing an ideal
or spiritual conception of this principle of unity; or,
in other words, on proving that thought or mind
is the ultimate ground, at once the first and the
final cause, of all reality. Now, in the former of
these points, Plato is following up a line of thought
which had been marked out by the earlier Greek
philosophers, while in the latter he was giving a
deeper meaning and a wider scope to an idea which
he had derived from his master, Socrates. It will
therefore be necessary for the interpretation of Plato
to go back for a little upon his predecessors.
The conception of an absolute principle of unity
in the universe which is deeper than any of the
special forms of existence, was the earliest thought
of Greek philosophy; but it was not clearly grasped
before Xenophanes, who first set the permanent
unity of all things in opposition to all their diver-
sity and change. Xenophanes very naturally ex-
pressed this thought in an attack upon the
anthropomorphism of Greek mythology, which he
regarded as an illegitimate attempt to raise one
particular kind of being, one of the forms of
62 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
the finite, into the place which could be given
only to the Absolute. £C There is one God, greatest
of all gods and men, who is like to mortal
creatures neither in form nor in mind/’ It is
man's petty ambition and vanity that makes him
think of God as such an one as himself, and, “if
the oxen or the lions had hands and were able to
paint pictures or carve out statues like men, they
would have given their own forms to the gods.”
We have here a criticism of the humanised Poly-
theism of Greece, a criticism which rests on the
basis of an abstract Pantheism and repudiates the
idea of giving any form whatsoever to the abso-
lute Being, even the form of man himself. In
other words, we have here the idea of God as the
mere negation of the finite — an idea which could
not he adequately represented in mythology ; though
we may find a partial expression of it in the
Homeric representation of fate as a power beyond
the gods. In the apparently antagonistic philosophy
of Heraclitus we have what is really another
aspect of the same idea: for the endless llux of
the particular forms of the finite, whose existence
is nothing hut the process whereby they pass away
and merge in each other, is hut the opposite
counterpart of the changeless unity of the whole.
“The One remains, the many change and pass.”
The Heraelitean philosophy exhibits what has been
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
63
called the “ dialectic of the finite,” or, in other words,
its self-contradiction when taken by itself : and this,
as we have seen, is just the dialectic of the religions
consciousness, by which it is lifted from the par-
ticular to the universal, from the transitory to the
eternal, from the finite to the infinite. Take any
partial or limited existence, take even matter or
mind in its abstraction, and we find that the idea
of it ultimately breaks down and carries us beyond
itself, and that to treat it as a self-determined
whole, an absolutely independent substance, involves
a contradiction ; in other words, we cannot think it
at all except as transitory and changing. And what
makes this movement of thought real for the com-
mon consciousness, even where its logical necessity is
not reflected upon, is that the very existence of a finite
being is found to be the process of its dissolution.
“ The process of its life is the process of its death.”
This lesson is brought home to everyone by the
experience of a life, which is lived under the
shadow of death, and in which everything inward
and outward seems to be perpetually slipping away
from us. But the Greek mind was specially open
to this pathos of finite existence, just because of
its keen sensitiveness to its joys. The refrain of
mortality is continually appearing even in the
earliest song of Homer with all its fresh delight in
the beauty of life : and as reflexion deepened, it
CA THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
seemed to the Greeks only to disclose more dis-
tinctly — beyond all the brightness of earthly existence
and even beyond all the beautiful forms of the gods
of Olympus — the harshness of an inexorable law of
destiny.
Now, the first reading of this lesson of the
vanity of all finite things tends to carry the
mind to the idea of an Absolute in which all is
lost and nothing is found again ; from mere change
and multiplicity to mere permanence and unity,
from the nothingness of the finite world to a God
who is only its negation. From this point of view
we may recognise the philosophies of Xenophanes
and Heraclitus as half -thoughts, each of which finds
its complement in the other, the whole thought
which arises out of their recombination being just
that conception of an absolute unity mediated by
the negation of all difference and change, which we
have already recognised as the basis of all theology.
This, then, is the first of the two characteristic
elements in the philosophy of Plato. But so far we
have only a pantheistic unity, a principle of unity
which is negatively related to all things, and which
therefore cannot be properly conceived as an ideal
or spiritual, any more than it can properly bo con-
ceived as a material principle. The second element,
the idealistic or spiritualistic element, in the Platonic
thought is derived, mainly if not entirely, from
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
65
Socrates. It is true that Anaxagoras first referred
the order of the universe to a rational principle,
when he said that “all things were in chaos till
reason came to arrange them ” ; but apparently all
he meant was that the world is a system capable
of being understood, because the connexion of its
parts is determined by definite laws, and not that,
as a whole, it is a manifestation of reason, or
a system in which the highest good is realised.
It was Socrates who first reached the conception
of such a system. In a passage in the Memora-
bilia , 1 he is represented as declaring that, just as
the substances that go to constitute man’s body are
derived from the material world, so his mind is a
little ray of intelligence drawn from the great soul
of the universe. Socrates then proceeds to give
expression to a few of the ordinary arguments from
design, based mainly on the adaptation of man’s
environment to his needs or of his physical organism
to the purposes it has to subserve. It is clear,
therefore, that if Socrates had attempted to con-
struct any system of nature, he would have adopted
a teleological view of things in which God would
have been conceived as a designer working with
conscious purpose to realise an end, and that end
the happiness of his creatures and especially of
man. In short, Socrates, in so far as he attempted
1 Mem., I, 4, 8.
1
VOL. I.
66 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
a theory of the universe at all, was disposed to
think of it in the same way as he thought of
the moral life of man. But he rather put aside
all such ambitious designs and, except in this one
place, he is represented as confining himself entirely
to the sphere of ethics. And oven ethics was for
him not so much a science, as an art of life.
Socrates was thus, as it were, a philosopher by
accident, one who took to philosophy to satisfy not
a speculative hut a practical want. Living in an
age of enlightenment, an ago when the old guides
of life, religion and law and custom, wore losing
their hold upon the mind of man, he was com-
pelled to find a substitute for them by reflexion
upon the meaning and object of human existence.
Hence he is the prophet of clear self-consciousness,
who takes the Delphic epigram, < Know thyself/
as his motto, and maintains that virtue must
always be founded on such knowledge. For him
the great source of error and evil is want of
thought — that men go on living without considering
the meaning and value of life, or asking themselves
what good they expect to get out of their existence
as a whole. Hence, though their wish is for the
good— and, strictly speaking, no one can wish for
anything else— they neither know what the good is,
nor whore to find it, and they blunder on from
day to day, taking any tiling that attracts them for
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
67
the good which they really desire. The aim of
Socrates is to awake men to a realisation of what
they are, and what therefore they must seek, if they
would make the best of their existence and find
satisfaction for themselves. Morality, he contends, is
nothing but the art of living, and the conditions of
success in it are like those of any other art. Now,
every kind of art, whether mechanical or fine art,
has to prescribe a definite course of conduct in
which actions are regulated with reference to an
end ; and it therefore involves a clear consciousness
of that end, and of the means whereby it is to be
attained. But while no one would attempt to
practise any common art without such knowledge,
in the greater art of living men constantly act in
this way, without asking themselves what they are
living for, or whether the particular actions they
do are fitted to secure it.
Is there then no end at all for human life,
no good which it may be expected to secure for
him who uses it aright ? To suppose that this
is so, is to forget that in all our ethical judg-
ments, in all our expressions of moral approval
or disapproval, in all our characterisation of actions
as good or bad, we presuppose that there is
such an end ; and that it is the standard to
which we are bound to bring our lives, and
by which we must estimate their worth. But this
68 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
general acknowledgment is fruitless, because no
attempt is made to realise what such language
really means. It is supposed that everyone knows
and just for that reason no one enquires ; but so
long as no ono enquires, it is impossible that
ignorance can be removed, or that any remedy
can be applied to the ills which ignorance brings
with it.
Hence the first demand of Socrates is for othical
reflexion and investigation, o ave^eTacrTo<; (Bios oil
I3iwtos avdpccTrcp : 1 “a life without criticism, or re-
flexion upon the meaning of life, is unworthy of a
man”: it is rather the life of an irrational animal.
For ‘ virtue is knowledge,’ both in the negative sense
that there can be no virtue without knowledge, and
in the positive sense that, if knowledge is attained,
virtue must follow. As to the former of thoso senses,
Socrates maintains that he who is not conscious of
the good, or does not know in what it consists, cannot
possibly pursue it, or even consider the means whereby
it is to be attained. If a virtuous life is a moral
work of art in which every part is determined by the
idea of the whole, it is impossible that it should be
realised except by one who has that idea. It is
possible that the particular actions done by an indi-
vidual without airy knowledge of the good may be
similar to those which ho would have had to do in
1 Apologia, 38 a ,
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
69
order to attain it ; but they will not really have the
same character as if they were so done. Indeed, as
not being done with a view to the good, they will have
bhe character of vice. “He who is courageous with-
out knowledge is courageous by a kind of cowardice :
he who is temperate without knowledge is temperate
by a kind of intemperance/' On the other hand, if
men are once awakened to a consciousness of their
real good, how can they do otherwise than pursue it ?
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
In all that we seek, what we really wish to find is
the good ; and if it be once revealed to us, if we are
enabled to see through the illusions which make us
mistake something else for it, we must pursue it and
it alone. It is just because men are blind, because
“they know not what they do,” that they are led away
from the right path; and if we can awake them to
reflexion, we shall have laid the foundation for their
moral regeneration.
The first step, therefore, is to make men conscious
of their ignorance, i.e. not merely of ignorance in
general, but of ignorance of that in which they con-
tinually regard themselves as wise. For every moral
judgment, every judgment with such predicates as
just, unjust, temperate, intemperate, right, wrong,
involves such a claim to ethical knowledge; yet this
claim is found to be invalid and baseless so soon as
those who confidently use such general terms are
70 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
called upon to define or explain them. The aim of
the Soeratic interrogation was, therefore, in the first
place, to awake a consciousness that knowledge was
wanting, and that without it men were like vessels
without rudder or stoorsman ; and, secondly, to teach
them the method of reilexion and investigation by
which alone such ignorance could be removed. To find
what is meant by the moral universal, the words of
ethical import which we are continually using, above
all to define ' the chief good, 5 to which all such words
point as their ultimate basis, is the great object of all
theory, as to realise it in our lives is the great object
of all practice. Thus a virtuous life is for Socrates a
life in which every thought and feeling, every impulse
and action, is regulated in view of that good which
man’s nature fits him to realise and enjoy. And the
first condition of such a life is that this good should
be clearly defined, and that the means to it should
be deliberately chosen. Whether the individual is
a part of a wider teleological system or no, becomes
thus for Socrates a secondary question ; and what he
is mainly interested to maintain is that each man for
himself should work out such a system in his own
life. Socrates thinks, indeed, that each individual,
in achieving his own mission, will also he serving the
State and realising the divine will ; hut his starting-
point is individualistic and ethical, and the social and
religious aspects of life fall into the background. He
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO 71
does not bid men rebel against authority, but he finds
the source and sanction of all authority not without
but within, in the reason and reflexion of the indi-
vidual. Let each man be man and master of himself
knowing what he seeks in life and steadfastly seeking
what he knows. This is to Socrates the umcm
necessarium , the first principle of ethics, the one con-
dition of moral existence to which everything else is
to be subordinate.
Now, the obvious criticism upon this view of moral
life is that it would exclude the greater part of what
we commonly call morality. For the virtue of child-
hood in all cases, and the virtue of most men
throughout life, is not what Socrates demands, not
the conscious pursuit of that which is recognised
as the highest moral end; it is only the habitual
practice of certain kinds of action which are accepted
as good, the habitual obedience to certain rules which
are regarded as right, without any reflexion upon the
reasons why they are so regarded. Men from their
earliest years are moralised by the silent influences
of their social environment in the family and the
State, aided by the sanctions of religion. But if, for
a virtuous life, we demand a definite conception of
the good of human existence and a definite regulation
of all a man’s ways by such a conception, we shall
find very little virtue in the world, if indeed we can
find any virtue at all. Comte said that the ideal of
72 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
a liappy life was that tlio aspiration after some great
object or achievement should be awakened in youth
and gradually followed out to its completion in
maturcr years. But such a continuity of growing
purpose is givou to very few, and oven to them it is
not given in the definite form which Socrates seems
to require. It is given rather as a dim anticipation
which becomes clearer and clearer as the man ad-
vances toward its fulfilment, and which rises into
perfect distinctness only when it has been attained.
Thus life, even to those who realise most fully what
their aims are, is a strangely mingled web of con-
sciousness and unconsciousness, and the star which
they follow is a light shining in darkness. “ A good
man,” said Goethe, “ in his dark strivings is somehow
conscious of the right way ’’ ; while Oliver Cromwell,
looking upon the opposite side of the shield, declared
that “ we never rise so high as when we do not know
whither we are going.” At least wo may say that it
is not given to any man to order his lifo from be-
ginning to end with a clear knowledge of its meaning
and purpose, and that action guided by conscious
principle is rather the highest form to which morality
rises than its normal typo. Even Socrates himself
may be quoted in the samo sense ; for he did not
profess in all cases to guide his own lifo by ethical
science, but fell back on what ho called a divine voico
that spoke within him, i.e. upon an unreasoned intui-
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO 73
tive perception of what ought to be done, which
he regarded as a kind of oracle of the gods.
The truth is that in the moral life we cannot draw
a sharp line of division between consciousness and
unconsciousness, or rather we must say that there
are many grades of relative consciousness or uncon-
sciousness; reaching down, on the one hand, to the
mechanical observance of rules prescribed by an
external authority ; and up, on the other hand, to
the full realisation of a universal principle as furnish-
ing a guide in all the details of action. The child
is, in the main, externally guided or constrained to
practise certain habits and to obey certain rules ; but
these rules and habits have generally some rationale
behind them, as being rules and habits which are
needful to the maintenance of order in the society
to which he belongs. And the intelligence of the
child, while he is taught to observe them, does not
remain entirely passive. What is commanded, so
far as it has a rational meaning, commends itself
to his reason and conscience, and helps to develop
them. The rule from without is met by the
‘ greeting of the spirit 5 from within, and obedience
is made easier by an awaking consciousness of its
necessity. There is, no doubt, a long way from such
dawning appreciation of the order to which his life is
subjected to the full and loyal acceptance of it as his
own law, and therefore as a law of liberty ; and from
74 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
that again to a reflective consciousness of the universal
principle that underlies all tho particular rules, at
once giving them their authority and limiting then-
application. Nor is it possible at any point in this
advance to draw a sharp line of distinction between
conscious and unconscious morality. Rather wc might
say that there is no stage at which morality is either
completely conscious or completely unconscious ; and
that every stage may he called conscious in relation
to the stage before it, and unconscious in relation
to the stage after it. It is true, indeed, that the
continuity of the moral lifo is sometimes interrupted
by crises and even by revolutions, in which men seem
to break away from their past and to make an
entirely new beginning. There is such a thing as
conversion. But such breaks aro apt to bo treated
as more sharp and complete than they really are,
and often — at least in cases where the individual
has had any good social training — tho main feature
of the change is that ho learns to realise tho full
meaning and spirit of the rules ho has boon taught
to obey, and so vivifies tho half -mechanical life of
habit by the apprehension of tho principle from
which it derives its value. Thus revolution in
individual as in national life is generally tire cul-
mination of a long process of preparation, like tho
lighting of the spark for which the explosive train
has been laid ready, or, to use a better illustration,
75
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
like the first emergence of the plant from under-
ground where its germinative forces have been slowly
maturing.
We can see, however, that it was very natural
for Socrates, as for other teachers in a similar
position, to exaggerate the difference between con-
scious morality and that which is relatively un-
conscious. His whole purpose, his essential work
and vocation, was to awaken men to reflexion, to
arouse them to a clear consciousness of themselves,
to call upon them to take life seriously and
realise for themselves what they were to make of
their lives. His attitude was like that of a modern
religious teacher who is endeavouring to make men
feel the necessity of acting from the highest principle ;
and who, in view of this object, is not careful to
make a distinction between one who is outwardly
respectable and satisfies the demands of the ordin-
arily accepted code of morals, and one who falls
below that standard, or even one who is openly
vicious. For what he seeks is not merely to make
men act rightly, but to make them act upon the right
motive; and he may even be inclined to accept the
dangerous maxim that “whatever is not of faith is
sin,” and to treat the outwardly good and the out-
wardly bad as upon the same level, in so far as
the former, no less than the latter, want that deep
religious principle from which alone, in his view,
76
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
true moral life can spring. So it was with Socrates.
No action seemed to him virtuous which was not
based upon a knowledge of the ethical end, and he
even asserted the paradox that it was better to do ill
with knowledge than to do well without it. Nor does
he seem to have allowed that there was any middle
term between knowledge and ignorance, between the
deliberate pursuit of the highest good and a life
guided by casual impulses and mechanically accepted
customs which are entirely without any moral
value.
Such a view, however little Socrates might intend
it, was essentially individualistic and unsocial in its
effect. It set each man to think out the problem
of life for himself; and if it did not put him in
opposition to society, at least it made him regard
his relations to it as secondary, and not as the
essential basis of his moral existence. And from
the point of view of a religion like that of Greece,
which was essentially national (and even municipal)
in its spirit, consecrating the Oity-state as a kind
of church or divine institution, this was a pro-
foundly irreligious attitude. Thus, literally and
absolutely, Socrates was guilty of the charges which
were brought against him. lie “ corrupted the youth
and brought new gods into Athens,’' if it were cor-
rupting the youth to teach them to set reason above
authority, and if it were bringing new gods into
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO 77
Athens to appeal to inward conviction as the one
authentic voice of God. Hence also it was a natural
result that many of the immediate followers of
Socrates, the Minor Socratic schools as they are called,
should have adopted a thorough-going individualism,
which withdrew them from the community, and
repudiated all its claims, as well as all the re-
ligious ideas that were connected therewith. Thus
with them, as with some of the Sophists, the
appeal to conscious reason took a distinctly revolu-
tionary form, breaking the bonds of kindred and
citizenship, and making the individual a law and
an end to himself, independent at once of gods
and men. This conception was developed in a
hedonistic way by the Cyrenaics, who made pleasure,
and even the pleasure of the moment, the end of
all action: and it was developed by the Cynics in
the direction of an asceticism which sought to secure
the freedom of the individual by breaking all the
ties which bind him to the things or beings that
are without him. The Cynic philosophy, with its
intolerance, its defiance of all law and authority,
its revolutionary effort to liberate man by stripping
him of every covering of his nakedness which
civilisation or the customs and institutions of social
life have provided, was the extreme form, we might
say the reductio ad absurdum , of the Socratic idea
of independence. And the Cyrenaic philosophy
78 THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
seemed to reach the same result by showing that
he who lives for himself must live for pleasure,
and — since individual pleasures as such have no
necessary unity or connexion — for the pleasure of
the moment.
We have now considered the two main lines of
speculation which contributed to the development of
the Platonic philosophy. Plato, in fact, entered upon
the whole inheritance of Greek thought, and his ideal-
ism was the result of a synthesis of all the tendencies
that show themselves in it. In particular, to adopt a
phrase of Green’s, he read the earlier philosophers with
the eyes of Socrates, and Socrates with the eyes of
the earlier philosophers, and thus was enabled to rid
himself of the presuppositions of both, and to re-
constitute philosophy on a new basis. It was his
great work to combine that idea of a fundamental
principle of unity in all things, which inspired the
earlier schools, with the Socratic conception of reason,
as the one power which is able to produce order out
of chaos and to reduce all the manifold and conflict-
ing elements of reality to one self-consistent whole.
This conception which Socrates had set before him-
self and his pupils as an ethical ideal, Plato
treated as the master-key to the real nature not
only of man, individual and social, but also of the
whole universe. In doing so, he was led gradually
to correct and supplement the errors and inadequacies
THE PRECURSORS OF PLATO
79
of the philosophy of Socrates — his abrupt and un-
mediated contrast of knowledge and ignorance, the
indeterminateness of his conception of the good, his
tendency to over-emphasise the subjective aspect of
ethics and to withdraw the individual from the
community, and man from the universe of which he
is essentially a part. On the other hand, while thus
freeing the ideas of Socrates from their onesided-
ness, Plato drew the Eleatic conception of the unity
of all things out of its abstraction, and found in the
teleological ideas of Socrates the means of combining
it with the Heraclitean conception of manifoldness
and change. He thus laid the foundations of ideal-
istic philosophy for all subsequent times.
It will be my endeavour in the following lectures
to show how these views are developed in the
successive dialogues of Plato.
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PLATONIC IDE ALIS M,
We have seen that the Platonic philosophy in its
most general aspect may be described as an exten-
sion to the universe of the principle which Socrates
applied to the life of the individual man, and more-
over that this extension was due mainly to the com-
bination of Socratie ideas with ideas derived from
the earlier philosophy of Greece. This general state-
ment, however, true as it is, will not enable us to
explain the distinctive character of Platonism, nnW
we follow out at least the main lines of development
along which Plato’s thought was carried as it absorbed
these different elements. This mode of explanation
has been made easier and more effective of late years
since the order of the Platonic dialogues has been
approximately determined by linguistic considerations
irrespective even of the doctrines taught in them.
Following such indications we find that, as we
might have expected, Plato is in the first instance
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 81
simply the pupil of Socrates, and that his earliest
works are mainly devoted to the illustration of the
Socratic method and the Socratic ideas. They deal,
on the one hand, with the method of interrogation
by which Socrates awakened in his pupils a con-
sciousness of ignorance and then led them on to the
formation of more and more comprehensive and exact
definitions of moral conceptions ; and, on the other
hand, with the Socratic view of the moral life as a
process determined by the idea of good as the end
of action. In the course of these dialogues, how-
ever, Plato shows a growing sense of certain diffi-
culties which beset the strict Socratic doctrine, and,
in particular, of two great but closely connected
difficulties, the one arising from the sharpness of the
Socratic distinction between knowledge and ignorance,
of which I have already spoken, and the other
from the ambiguity and imperfection of the Socratic
definition of the good which is the final end of
action. Socrates, indeed, seemed to fix the nature
of that end by the term evSaiju.oma, commonly trans-
lated 'happiness’; but the various senses in which his
teaching was understood by his disciples show that
he did not anticipate or decide any of the contro-
versies about the nature of happiness which arose
among them; and, in particular, that he did not
discuss the great question — whether happiness is to
be found in activity or in feeling, in the exercise of
von, X. F
82 THE BEGINNINGS OF
the faculties of man, or in the pleasure or satisfac-
tion that follows upon such exercise.
Now to Plato that question became one of
the most important of all ethical issues, and there
was ultimately no ambiguity in his rejection of
the purely hedonistic alternative. But there was
a time when Hedonism seemed to him to afford the
most natural interpretation of the Socratic theory
that 'virtue is knowledge/ In the Protagoras , which
is probably the latest of the Socratic dialogues,
Socrates is made to maintain the doctrine after-
wards called psychological Hedonism, that pleasure is
the only possible object of desire, and that, when we
seem to pursue any object which is not the most
pleasant at the moment, it is only as an indirect
means to greater pleasure in the future. On this
view, it would follow that the difference between
virtue and vice lies, not in our acting or not acting
with a view to pleasure, but in the character of the
pleasures we seek. The vicious man is he who is
led by his short-sightedness to sacrifice a greater but
remoter good to one that is nearer but less valuable ;
the virtuous man is he who has learned to look
before and after, and to calculate the ultimate effect
of each action in producing pleasure and pain. Such
an ethical calculus alone, it is held, can raise men
above the illusive appearance of the moment, and
enable them to regulate their conduct in view of
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
83
the greatest pleasure in life as a whole. On the
other hand, if we can so regulate our actions, we
inevitably must do so; for, ex hypothesi, the only
thing we can desire or will is pleasure, and when
we know what course will bring us most pleasure,
we necessarily follow it. In this sense, therefore,
virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance, and the
whole task of ethics is to furnish a relative esti-
mate of the degree and quantity of pleasure to be
derived from different objects.
But Plato has no sooner drawn out this hedonistic
scheme of life than he begins to throw doubt upon
it, both in itself and as an interpretation of the
Socratic doctrine ; and even in the very dialogue in
which he sets it before us, he opposes to it another
view, which he puts into the mouth of the Sophist
Protagoras. Protagoras is made the representative of
ordinary morality, which is based upon custom and
opinion and not upon scientific reflexion; and in answer
to the question of Socrates as to the way in which
ethical truth is to be taught, he is made to maintain
the thesis that it is not the subject of any special
science but the product of a common instinct of
humanity ; and that therefore there are no special
experts from whom it must be learnt, but that, in a
sense, everybody teaches it to everybody. This idea
is expressed in a sort of mythic apologue, in which
the gods are described as making all mortal creatures
84 THE BEGINNINGS OF
out of the elements, and then handing them over to
Prometheus and Epimetheus to endow them with the
qualities necessary for their preservation. It is agreed
that Epimetheus shall make the distribution, and that
Prometheus shall inspect and criticise the result.
Epimetheus, therefore, gifts the animals with various
powers — some with swiftness, some with size, some
with strength, and so on, till he has exhausted all
that he has to bestow. But then it is found that
man has been left unprovided, a helpless, unarmed
creature, whose existence is narrow and precarious;
and Prometheus has to come to the rescue, and to
steal from heaven fire and the arts that work by fire,
as well as the art of weaving, to be the heritage of
man. But even when so endowed, men are still left
without the political art, the art of living together in
peaceful co-operation ; consequently they are involved
in a continual struggle for existence against each
other, and are in danger of being dispersed and
destroyed by the other animals. But “ Zeus, fearing
that the entire race should be exterminated, comes
to their aid, bringing with him reverence and justice
(aiSw and Slier)) to be the ordering principles of cities
and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.” These
principles, however, are not given like special talents
to particular individuals, but shared among all; for
“cities cannot subsist if a few only share in the
virtues, as a few only have capacity for any special
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
85
art ” : civil society, therefore, must be protected by
the law that “he who has no part in justice or
reverence shall be put to death as a plague to the
State .” 1 Hence it is that, when men consult together
upon matters that fall under the particular arts, they
take experts into their counsel, and pay no attention
to advice from those who are not experts; whereas,
when they discuss virtue and vice, good and evil,
everybody is supposed to have a right to speak :
for on this subject, though one man may know a
little more than another, there are no professional
teachers who are essentially distinguished from the
rest of mankind, but all the citizens are teachers
of all.
Protagoras then proceeds to give a sketch of the
forms taken by this popular education in morals as
it was actually in use in Greece. “ Education and
admonition commence in the first years of life and
last to the very end of it. Mother and nurse, father
and tutor, are vying with each other about the im-
provement of the child as soon as ever he is able
to understand what is said to him : he cannot say or
do anything without their setting forth to him that
‘ this act is just ’ and ‘ that is unjust * ; ‘ this is holy *
and f that is unholy ; ; 4 do this * and ‘ abstain from
that/ And if he obeys, well and good ; if not, he is
straightened by threats and blows like a piece of bent
1 Protag . , 322 D.
86
THE BEGINNINGS OF
or warped wood. At a later stage they send him. to
teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even
more than to his reading and music ; and the teachers
do as they are desired. And when the boy has
learned his letters, and is beginning to understand
what is written, as before he understood what was
spoken, they put into his hands the works of great
poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school ; in
these are contained many admonitions and many
profitable tales, and encomiums of ancient famous
men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order
that he may imitate or emulate them, and desire to
become like them. Then again the teachers of the lyre
take similar care that the young disciple is tempeiate
and gets into no mischief ; and when they have taught
him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the
works of other excellent poets who have written
lyrics; and these they set to music, and make their
harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's
souls, in order that they may learn to be gentle and
harmonious and rhythmical, and so fitted for speech
and action ; for the life of man in every part has need
of harmony and rhythm. Then they send them to
the masters of gymnastic, in order that their bodies
may better minister to the virtuous mind, and that
they may not be compelled through bodily weakness
to play the coward in war or on any other occasion.
- . • When they have done with masters, the State
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 87
again compels them to learn the laws, and live after
the pattern which they furnish, and not after their
own fancies : and, just as, when the pupil is learning
to write, the writing-master first draws lines with a
style for the guidance of the young beginner, and gives
him the tablet and makes him follow the lines, so
the city draws the laws which were the invention of
good lawgivers living in the olden times; these are
given to the young man to guide him in his conduct,
whether he is commanding or obeying; and he who
transgresses them is to be corrected, or, in other
words, called to account .” 1
Now it is, I think, obvious that we have here two
views of education which are sharply contrasted. On
the one side, we have the uncompromising development
of the Socratic doctrine that 'virtue is knowledge/
with all the contempt of Socrates for ordinary opinion
— which he regards as ignorance pretending to be
knowledge — a contempt which reminds us of the atti-
tude of Bentham towards those who appealed to moral
sentiment in opposition to the results of his utilitarian
theory. And what makes the parallel closer is that
Socrates is here made to narrow his own doctrine by
defining the good as the maximum of pleasure and the
minimum of pain, and thus to reduce ethical science
to a calculus of pleasures. On the other hand, the
1 Protag., 325 C. seq. The similarity of this sketch of education
to that given in the earlier part of the Republic is evident.
88 THE BEGINNINGS OF
unsystematic and unscientific idea of morals is stated
with equal one-sidedness by the Sophist Protagoras,
who identifies morality with a natural sentiment
which is developed by the action of many minds
upon each other, by the ordinary social training of
the family and the school, by the influences of poetic
literature, and by the rewards and penalties which
the State bestows and inflicts on its members, but
not at all by that scientific process of reflexion and
definition which Socrates regarded as all-important.
Now if it be asked, which of these views we are to
attribute to Plato, we must answer, Neither and both.
In other words, as is indicated at the end of the
dialogue, Plato has set before us two views, each of
them one-sided and imperfect, neither of which he
could absolutely accept or reject. It was impossible
that he should accept the narrow hedonistic view here
attributed to Socrates ; yet neither could he surrender
his confidence in the Socratic method or his convic-
tion of the necessity of raising ethics into the form of
science. He was obviously beginning to perceive that
in ordinary opinion — in that common consciousness of
ethical distinctions which is developed without any
special scientific training by the experience of social
life — there is a large element of truth, however mingled
with error and illusion. The abrupt Socratic division
of knowledge and ignorance was no longer tenable for
him, nor could he any longer suppose that virtue was
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 89
dependent for its primary development upon philo-
sophical discussion. Kather — as was shown by the
practice, however it might be excluded by the theory,
of Socrates himself — ordinary opinion must be regarded
as the first form of that consciousness of the good,
which philosophy has to analyse and develop. And
if, as is the case, ethical science must be regarded as
standing in a negative relation to opinion, as in a
sense opposing and even subverting it, yet after all it
must derive the means of correcting and transforming
opinion from opinion itself. Opinion must furnish at
least the starting-point of investigation; and if there
were no truth in it, truth in ethics could never be
attained at all.
We may take it, then, that Plato in the Protagoras
is at the parting of the ways. He is emancipating
himself from Socrates, or, as he would probably himself
have conceived it, he is advancing from a lower to a
higher interpretation of Socratic principles, by the
interposition of the middle term of opinion between
the extremes of ignorance and knowledge which
Socrates left in unmediated opposition. And in the
Meno 9 a dialogue which on linguistic grounds must be
placed in close connexion with the Protagoras , we find
that Plato has taken this new step. In the beg innin g
of the dialogue he states in the most direct way the
difficulty which arises out of the Socratic position.
Socrates has proposed to enter upon an enquiry into the
90 THE BEGINNINGS OF
nature of virtue, of which he professes himself ignorant,
and is met by Meno with the objection : “ How will
you enquire into that which you do not already know ?
What will you put forth as the subject of the enquiry ?
And, if you find what you want, how will you recognise
that this is the thing which you did not know ? ” “I
see what you mean,” answers Socrates, “ but consider
what a troublesome discussion you are raising. You
argue that a man cannot enquire either into that which
he knows or into that which he does not know : for, if
he knows, he has no need to enquire, and, if not, he
cannot enquire, for he does not know the very subject
about which he has to enquire.” 1
The difficulty here suggested is not a mere Scholastic
subtility : it is really one of the most important prob-
lems in the theory of knowledge. It is the question
of the relation of science to the ordinary conscious-
ness. If science were merely an analysis of ordinary
experience, and did not yield anything more than we
can find in such experience, it would be useless ; for
it would not bring us a step farther than we were
before. If, on the other hand, it does carry us beyond
such experience, must it not be by a kind of leap in
the dark ? If the premises anticipate the conclusion,
what is the use of drawing it ? If they do not antici-
pate the conclusion, how can it legitimately be drawn ?
Plato was the first to face this difficulty, and the
1 Afeno, 80 d .
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 91
answer he gives to it, or at least his first answer,
takes the form of what seems to be a mere myth or
poetic fiction ; though perhaps we may find that it
conveys a serious meaning, a meaning which becomes
more distinct in the farther development of his philo-
sophy. In any case the answer is one which deserves
our particular attention, as it is the first expression of
that ideal theory which is the basis of Plato’s
philosophical theology.
Poets and other inspired men, we are here told, have
declared “ that the soul is immortal and at one time
has an end which is termed dying, and at another
time is born again, but is never destroyed. . . . The
soul then, as being immortal, and as having been born
again many times, and having seen all things that
exist, whether in this world or in the world above, has
knowledge of them all : and it is no wonder that she
should be able to call to remembrance all that she
knows about virtue : for, as all nature is akin and the
soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in
eliciting, or as men say, learning, out of a single
recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does
not faint : for all enquiry and all learning is recollec-
tion.” 1 On this view, then, the soul from the begin-
ning has all truth in itself, but has it in a dim implicit
way, as we might be said to know something which we
have forgotten but of which the recollection may be
1 Metio, 81 b.
92
THE BEGINNINGS OF
again awakened in ns. This view Socrates seeks to
illustrate by the aid of a young slave whom he ques-
tions, and gradually, by mere questioning, leads to the
discovery of the solution of a geometrical problem.
In the first instance, the boy gives a wrong answer,
but he is made by further questioning to correct
himself and to attain to a true view of the sub-
ject : and Socrates then draws what seems to be
the necessary inference. “ What do you say of
this, Meno, were not these answers given out of
his own head ? ” “ Yes, they were all his own.”
“ And yet, as we were now saying, he did not know ? ”
“ Yes.” “ But still he had in him these notions of his,
had he not ? Then he who does not know, may still
have true notions of that which he does not know.”
“ Yes.” “ And at present these notions have just been
stirred up in him as a dream, but if he were frequently
asked the same questions in different forms, he would
know as well as any one of us at last.” 1 His
knowledge, therefore, Socrates argues, is recollection,
and if he did not acquire it before in this life, he must
have acquired it in another life, or else he must have
had it always. The possibility of learning is thus
traced back to the fact that knowledge, all knowledge,
is in the soul in a potential way, as a memory of some
previous state of existence, which is not at first con-
sciously present to us but may be recalled.
1 Meuo, 85 B. tteq.
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 93
Analogy is usually the first form in which now
truth presents itself, and it was so above all with
Plato, in whom the poet generally spoke before the
philosopher. Yet there is always a danger that one
who has grasped such an analogy, may treat it not
merely as a guide to the truth — to the identity that
underlies the likeness — but as itself constituting the
whole truth to which it points : and it may bo that
this was the case with Plato. But we should not
at once assume that it was so, still less should we
assume that it remained so with him to the end.
The metaphor of ‘ Reminiscence ’ is a convenient
way of bringing before us the idea that the acquisi-
tion of knowledge is not a process of putting some-
thing into the mind ab extra , but the evolution of
something involved in its own nature. The same
metaphor is implied in many common ways of
speaking. When we say that we ‘ recognise ’ the
truth of an observation, it is not that we have
known it before, but only that we had already
before us the data from which it might bo drawn.
When we say “ You are forgetting yourself” we
do not mean that you have foi'gotten the indi-
vidual being that you are, but that there is a
rational principle, which is one with your very
self, and which you are failing to realise. Self-
recollection in this sense docs not mean going back-
ward upon the past but inward upon a deeper
94 THE BEGINNINGS OF
nature, which, perhaps we have never been fully
conscious of before. The same idea is illustrated
by the claim which Plato puts into the mouth of
Socrates, that in interrogating he is practising
his mother’s art of midwifery upon the souls of
those whom he subjects to his questions . 1 Ob-
viously the metaphor of reminiscence cannot be
applied literally to the process whereby the mind
rises from the particular to the universal : for,
in so doing, it is not calling up the image of
some object or event known in the past, but
discovering the principle that underlies all similar
objects and events. Nor could Plato possibly have
thought that, in any world, universal could be
the objects of sense-perception, like particular
phenomena. Hence we should be disposed to say
that he was merely using this image as a first
expression of the truth which Aristotle puts more
definitely when he says that mind is potentially
all that it can know. And this, indeed, seems to
be the meaning of the alternative to which Plato
himself pointed when, in the passage already
quoted, he suggested that perhaps the mind
always had possession of these principles. While,
1 This metaphor is commonly attributed to Socrates, but it
appears for the first time in the Theaetetus , which is a compara-
tively late dialogue, and it indicates an advance beyond the
Platonic idea of Reminiscence. It probably rather represents
Plato’s own reflexion on the method of Socrates.
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
95
therefore, it may not be correct to say that to
Plato the idea of reminiscence was merely a
metaphor, it is at least obvious that it is not
the only or the final form in which he presents
his doctrine to us.
This becomes still more obvious when we con-
sider another conception which Plato introduces in
the passage quoted above : “ As all nature is akin,
and the soul has learned all things, there is no
difficulty in thus eliciting, or as men say, learning,
out of a single recollection all the rest, if one
is strenuous and does not faint.” The idea here
expressed is that reality is not a collection of
things, each of which might be known fully without
the others, but a connected system in which each
part implies the whole. Thus if we know anything,
there is in what we know a link of connexion
with everything else; and if we follow it out, we
shall gradually be brought into possession of the
whole. What we know already contains a partial
revelation of the general principle manifested in
all that exists. Thus it is as in an organism,
where the life of the whole works in every member
and organ, and there is no possibility of appreciat-
ing the significance and value of any part without
grasping in some measure the meaning of all the
rest. Hence learning cannot be a mere successive
process of adding on unconnected perceptions or
96 THE BEGINNINGS OF
experiences to each other ; it must be a process
of evolution, whereby a universal truth — which is
at first confused with a particular case of its appli-
cation — becomes separated from all particulars, and
at the same time is recognised as the principle that
determines their nature and their relations to each
other.
Now, this conception of reality, as an objective
system which is implied in the nature of the mind
that apprehends it — so that the growth of knowledge
of the world is at the same time the evolution of
self-consciousness — enables us to understand the
view of opinion which Plato takes, and by means
of which he seeks to solve the difficulty of the
Meno . Opinion is not to him, as it was to
Socrates, another word for ignorance : it is a state
of mind between knowledge and ignorance, in
which we make judgments in particular cases,
but are not able to give any reason for these
judgments. We say, ‘ this is just/ and ‘ that is
unjust/ without knowing what justice is. Eight
opinion may, indeed, in many cases serve the pur-
pose of knowledge. But it has two great draw-
backs. In the first place it is unstable. It is
“like the images of Daedalus,” which are beautiful
works of art but “ are apt to run away, unless
they are fastened by some tie.” So right opinions
are good but insecure, “unless they are fixed down
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
97
by a consideration of the cause n 1 i.e. of the reason
or principle from which they flow. And, in the
second place, as those who possess a faculty of
mating right judgments without any consciousness
of the grounds on which they rest are incapable
of explaining or vindicating them, they are unable
to communicate their faculty to others. It is in
them as a kind of inspiration or intuitive insight,
which makes them act rightly without knowing
what they do. Therefore “not by any wisdom nor
because they were wise, did Themistoeles, Pericles
and other great statesmen succeed in guiding their
states aright, but by a kind of divination; for
diviners and prophets say many things truly, but
they know not what they say.” And so it is also
with the poets, and in a sense with all good men,
who therefore are often called divine. If, however,
we could find anyone of these who should add to
his intuitive perception of the right a consciousness
of the reason of its rightness, his moral judg-
ments would have a far higher value, and he
would be among other living men what Tiresias was
among the dead; for, in the words of Homer “he
alone had the breath of life and intelligence in
him, while all the rest were but flitting shades .” 2
But important as this division between knowledge
and opinion seems to be, we must not forget that,
1 Meno , 98 a. 2 Id., 100 a,
VQL, I. G
98
THE BEGINNINGS OF
for Plato, it is these very opinions which supply the
means whereby we attain to knowledge. It is out
of the unexplained judgments of the ordinary moral
consciousness that we have to elicit the principles
or reasons on which scientific morals must rest.
We have to ascend from the particulars as given
in opinion to the universal principle, by aid of
which our views of these very particulars may be
corrected. But how is this process to be carried
out ? The Protagoras had suggested what seemed
a very simple way of performing it. It had pointed
out that there is one common element or circumstance
accompanying, and forming a part in all the ends
of our action, namely, that they secure pleasure or
avert pain by their attainment; and it had gone on
to maintain that this common element in all our
ends must be taken as the end, the summum lonum,
in reference to which they must all be estimated or
valued. Hence, what is needed to correct ordinary
opinion and to give a scientific basis to our particular
judgments in morals, is simply a measuring art, which
shall fix the value of all our actions by the amount
of pleasure they produce. But while this was one
way of achieving the Socratic aim of making morals
scientific, another and a better way seemed to be
suggested in the Meno. The great object of Socrates
had been to define the moral universals, the words
of approval or disapproval which are used in the
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
99
ordinary moral judgments of men ; and his method
of achieving it had consisted simply in bringing such
judgments together, comparing them, showing their
agreements and differences, and using one of them
as a negative instance to correct the hasty hypo-
thesis suggested by another; for in this way he
hoped to find a principle which would explain
them all, showing the amount of truth contained in
each, and accounting for the error that was mingled
with it. Thus, just as Newton from the many
apparent motions of terrestrial and celestial bodies
was enabled to elicit the principle of gravitation,
which explained all the appearances, and showed in
each case what the real motions were ; so Socrates,
according to this view, sought by a synthesis of the
varying judgments of men in particular moral
difficulties, to discover a fundamental principle of
morality which should justify these very judgments
so far as they were right, and correct them so far
as they were wrong. In so doing, in short, he was
simply following the path which inductive science
always has to follow when it seeks to penetrate
beyond phenomena to the real laws and nature of
things.
Now, the Meno had suggested a new explanation
of this process and its result. It had suggested
that the mind is possessed of a universal faculty,
or, in other words, that it is guided in its
100 THE BEGINNINGS OF
apprehension of particular phenomena by universal
principles, of which, however, it is not at first
conscious, and which it can only imperfectly apply.
Science, or knowledge in the stricter sense of the
word, must, therefore, mean primarily the bringing
of these principles to clear self-consciousness. Thus
the true import of the doctrine that f virtue is
knowledge’ must be, not that a calculative art of
life is to be substituted for the haphazard judgments
of ignorance, but that the truth which underlies the
judgments of the ordinary moral consciousness, even
when these judgments are erroneous, should be
discovered; that the reality, which is partly hid and
partly revealed by the first appearances of things,
should be brought to light by a comprehensive
induction and a dialectical discussion of these very,
appearances. For the error of opinion, or, in other
words, of the ordinary consciousness, lies in this, not
that it altogether fails to apprehend truth or reality,
but that it does not bring its different views of
things into connexion, or correct one of them .by
another; or, in other words, that it does not seek
for the unity that underlies all the differences and
contradictions of the appearances. Opinion is always,
so to speak, at some point of the circumference and
never at the centre, and therefore it can never see
things in their real value and relations. And truth
is to be found only by concentration, by 'thinking
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 101
things together’; i.e. it is to be found 011I7 in some
principle which explains all the diversities of ex-
perience in consistency with each other.
The Gorgias is the dialogue in which the reconsti-
tution of ethics upon the new basis begins. In it
Plato insists, not, as in the purely Socratic dialogues,
upon the opposition of ignorance and knowledge, but
upon the opposition, and at the same time the relation,
of opinion and knowledge, or, in other words, of the
apparent and the real in morals. Polus, one of the
antagonists of Socrates, speaks of the tyrant in a
despotic State and of the skilful rhetorician in a free
State as the persons who alone have it in their power
to attain the highest happiness ; for, more than any
other men, they can do what they please, can force
all other men to bend to their will, and can exile or
ruin all who oppose them. And Socrates is made to
answer with the apparent paradox that such men can
indeed do ‘ what seems to them best/ but that they,
least of all men, can do ‘ what they will/ 1 For what
men really will is not the means but the end, not the
particular acts they do or the particular objects they
strive after, but the good which they seek to secure
through these acts and objects. The immediate
objects of human desire — health, wealth, honour, etc.
— are, after all, only means to happiness, and not
1 Gorgias, 466 E, oioev yap ttolelv ftotiXovrai, ws £iro$ elireiv ' iroieiv
fJL&TQL 0 TL hv aVTOiS 56 ft iXrUTTOV ELVCU.
102 THE BEGINNINGS OF
happiness itself ; they are sought not for themselves
but sub ratione boni , with a view to the supreme good
of life. Thus what we really want is not to satisfy
our desires but to satisfy ourselves , and we can satisfy
ourselves only by the Summum Bonum ; but in our
shortsightedness the ultimate good we seek is apt to
become identified with the objects of special desires, and
we pursue such objects as if they offered a complete
satisfaction. And although, when we attain them, we
find that we are still unsatisfied, this experience does
not prevent us on the next occasion from falling
under the same illusion. Hence the mere power to
do what we please cannot help us, so long as we do
not know what we will, do not know where the real
satisfaction of the soul is to be found.
What, then, is this real good which Plato contrasts
with the satisfaction of particular desires ? One point
is clear to begin with, that it cannot be defined by
aid of the measuring art of the Protagoras . For,
according to the view there expressed, the supreme
good was simply the sum of particular goods or
pleasures. In other words, the Socrates of that
dialogue assumed the particular desires and the plea-
sures to which they point as his starting-point, and
regarded the supreme good as simply the greatest pos-
sible aggregate of such pleasures. He sought to define
the whole by means of the parts, taken severally and
then summed up together. But Plato now maintains
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 103
that we must begin with the unity of the whole and
regard the parts only as elements in it or means to it.
We are not to ask whether this object and that other
object, each by itself, satisfies a particular desire and
therefore gives a particular pleasure, and then add
them all together, deducting any pains that follow on
such pleasures and avoiding the objects which in the
long run cause a preponderance of pain. We are to
regard the good of life as one whole, and to estimate
the particular objects only as contributing to this.
For, as in any organism the whole is not the mere
sum of the parts, nor could we describe a man as
consisting of a head, plus arms, plus legs, and so
on, but rather the whole is in every part, and each
part can be estimated only as contributing to it : so
we cannot say that the good of man consists of a
number of separate goods — food, drink, wealth, honours,
and so on — and that his complete satisfaction consists
in the sum of the satisfactions to be got from all
these. Father we must regard the pleasure resulting
from the attainment of each of these objects as
illusory, in so far as it is not a means to, or an
element in, the one complete good which we are
always seeking. • Nor does it alter the result, if we
look at happiness in another way, as a good which
has to be realised in time ; for we cannot regard life
as a sum of particular actions or feelings, each of
which has to be estimated separately, but rather we
104
THE BEGINNINGS OF
must regard each moment "or period as a stage in the
attainment of the one good of existence, the full
realisation and satisfaction of the self.
This is not the exact form in which Plato pre-
sents his idea to us, but it expresses his essential
meaning. Thus he points out the analogy of virtue
in the soul to health in the body. To regard it as
the good of life to gratify every particular desire
to the utmost is, he argues, as if we should sup-
pose it to be the greatest good of the body to
have the utmost possible satisfaction of all the
appetites of sense without any consideration of
health. Hence the politician who seeks merely to
aggrandise the State, and to provide the citizens
with ‘ harbours and ships and colonies * and all the
luxuries and conveniences of life, without attending
to their moral and intellectual education, is like
a cook setting up for a doctor, and supplying
his patient with every kind of dainty that pleases
the palate without heeding the diseased state of the
body he may be producing. In the case of the
body it is obvious that it would be ruinous thus
to look to what is pleasant in particular and to
regard the general good as secondary ; for when
the order and due regulation of the parts is sacri-
ficed, this in the long run brings about the ruin of
the parts themselves. And the same is no less true
in the case of the soul; for what we really desire
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 105
is, as already said, not the particular object but the
good which we think' to find in it, and the satis-
faction derived from the former is transitory and
illusory, if it comes into collision with the latter.
Plato, then, concludes the dialogue by putting
the contrast between the two points of view in its
most vivid and extreme form. Hence Callicles, the
final opponent of Socrates, is made to maintain that
the supreme bliss is to have as many, as diverse
and as violent desires as possible, provided we
have the opportunity of satisfying them. “How,”
he asks, “can a man be happy who is the servant
of anything? On the contrary I venture plainly to
assert that he who would truly live ought to allow
his desires to wax to the uttermost and not to
chastise them; but when they have grown to the
greatest, he should have the courage and intelligence
to minister to them and satisfy all his longings.
This I affirm to be natural justice and nobility.
To this, however, many cannot attain ; and they
blame the strong man because they are ashamed of
their own weakness, which they desire to conceal;
and hence they say that intemperance is base.” 1
“That,” answers Socrates, “means that we are to
be like a cask with holes, into which water is con-
tinually being poured and from which it is as con-
tinually running out.” Hence it is the highest bliss
1 Gorgias , 491 E.
106 THE BEGINNINGS OF
to be filled with a devouring craving which is ever
receiving, but never has received, satisfaction. Our
pleasure is bound up with the pain of a want that
can never be filled ; and, as Shakespeare puts it, using
the same metaphor,
“The cloyed will,
That satiate but unsatisfied desire, that tub
Both full and running, ravening first the lamb,
Longs after for the garbage .” 1
As against this Plato puts the picture of the tem-
perate man, the man whose inner life is ordered by
one principle and therefore in harmony with itself,
who “when his casks are once filled, has no need
to feed them any more, and has no farther trouble
or care about them.” In other words, in him each
desire and impulse has a definite limit, within which
it is kept by regard to the others and to the whole
of which it is a part. But if this is the type of
humanity we are to aim at, then the true states-
man, the true educator of men, is one who will
maintain the balance of the soul, and who, when it
is in a diseased state, is ready to mortify and chas-
tise any particular desire till it is again reduced to
its proper proportions in relation to the rest. And
from this point of view Plato is prepared to support
the apparent paradox that it is better to suffer than
to do injustice, and that if any one does injustice,
1 Quoted by Thomson in his edition of the Gorgias.
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 107
he ought to wish to be punished for it and not to
escape, seeing that it is only by punishment he can
be cured.
In all this Plato does not yet give us more than
a formal description of the good, as an order or
organisation of life which is determined by one
principle. But what he distinctly maintains is that
we must begin with the unity of the whole and
not with the difference of the parts, with the uni-
versal and not with the particulars, and that the
former must determine the latter. And this is a
very important point ; for it shows that for Plato
the universal, or, to use his own word, the idea, is
not merely a common element in the particulars,
as pleasure is a common element in all the satis-
factions of our desires. It has, moreover, a very
distinct bearing upon the ordinary representation of
Plato’s theory of ideas, in which they are taken as
just such common elements. In the Gorgias at least
it is clear that the universal is conceived as the
organising principle of a whole which determines the
relations of all the parts. Further, this organising
idea in ethics is not conceived as something which
has to be brought to the parts or particulars from
without, but something which is implied in them,
or in our conceptions of them, from the beginning.
For, as Plato points out here, and as he shows
more fully in the Republic, the desire of the good
108 THE PLATONIC IDEALISM
underlies all our particular desires, and it is the good
that we really seek in every end we set before us.
“ This is what every man pursues and makes his end,
having a presentiment that there is such an end, and
yet hesitating because neither knowing its nature
nor having the same sure proof of it that we have
of other things.” 1 In other words, the good is the
presupposition of all particular goods just as the
truth is the presupposition of all our ordinary judg-
ments, which, no doubt, are often erroneous, but
nevertheless by synthesis and dialectic may be made
to yield the knowledge of a principle which will
enable us at once to explain and to correct them.
l Rep., 505 e.
LECTURE FIFTH.
THE NATUEE OF IDEAS AND THEIE SYSTEMATIC
UNITY.
In the last lecture I pointed out that Plato goes
beyond Socrates in two ways : in the first place, in so
far as he puts opinion — which is his name for the
ordinary consciousness before it has been changed by
any process of reflexion — between ignorance and
knowledge. In other words, he maintains that we
are never in a state of pure ignorance from which
science has to deliver us. If we ever were in such
a state, learning would be impossible, for it would
have nothing from which it could start. Opinion,
however, is inchoate knowledge; it is a knowledge
of appearances, which must indeed be partly illusive,
but which cannot be absolutely without relation to
the truth. It, therefore, affords a starting-point
from which investigation may begin, a material from
which, by synthesis and dialectic, truth may be
extracted.
110 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
In the second place, Plato transforms the view of
morality which is attributed to Socrates in the
Protagoras . He rejects the idea that the principle of
morals is to be found in the pleasure which accom-
panies, or forms an element in all attainment of our
ends, and that the science of morals is therefore simply
a calculus of pleasures. Such a view would involve
that the whole good of life was merely the sum of the
parts, whereas for Plato the particular goods of life
must rather be estimated and determined by the
nature of the whole. The fundamental idea of ethics
must therefore be conceived as a principle of unity
and order, which is implied in all our particular
ethical judgments, but fully expressed in none of
them, and which, when it is discovered, can be used
to correct and complete the judgments from which
it is derived.
So far Plato has been dealing mainly with the
problem of philosophy as it is conceived by Socrates.
He has been seeking to define the universals
which underlie our ethical judgments and these
only. But it was impossible for him to confine
his speculations to this sphere. For in every judg-
ment we make, we use universals or general ideas,
and in every case the same maxim will apply, namely,
that the universal must be taken neither as the
sum of the particulars nor as the abstraction of a
common element in them, but as a principle of unity
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 111
which is implied in them, and which, when discovered
and defined, will make them intelligible. Thus it is
not only such predicates as 'good/ ‘just/ ‘temperate/
that require definition, but all the predicates we use
even in our simplest judgments, such as ‘ one/ ‘ equal/
‘great/ ‘beautiful/ In all our immediate judgments
we use general ideas such as these, to determine
particular objects, without any previous definition of
the general ideas themselves. In all equally we
assume that we know that of which we are ignorant,
and in all equally the Socratic process of investigation
is necessary in order to define our universals, and to
correct the uncertain and imperfect use of them which
must prevail so long as they are undefined.
Nor could Plato be content with the definition of
these general terms taken separately. Each of them
is the name of a principle of unity within a certain
‘limited sphere, but all special spheres of existence are
elements in the one great whole of reality. Hence,
just as in the moral life all our definitions of par-
ticular virtues had to be carried back to the definition
of the good, as the principle of unity in human life,
so all definitions of general ideas must be carried
back to one principle of unity in the universe.
The problem of philosophy is, therefore, to rise from
opinion to truth, not only in ethics, but in all spheres
of reality; and not only to find special principles of
unity in all particular spheres of reality, but to bring
112
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
them all together into one system by the discovery of
one highest principle.
The dialogues which are most important in relation
to this development of the ideal theory are the
Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Republic — dialogues
which on the whole belong to the same stage of
thought, and which were probably not far distant
from each other in time of composition. The Sym-
posium and the Phaedo in particular seem to be
counterparts and complements of each other, the
former dwelling upon the positive relation of the
particular and the universal, the latter upon their
negative relation ; the former giving us a view of the
education of man in which sense and opinion are
treated as stepping-stones on which he may rise
to truth, while the latter regards sense and opinion
mainly as hindrances to his progress, and insists on
the necessity of a complete emancipation from both.
Yet it may easily be shown that there is no essential
discord between the two views ; for Plato has already
taught us to recognise the double nature of sen-
sible experience, as the necessary starting-point or
datum of science, and yet at the same time as
in itself only an imperfect and illusive appre-
hension of things, which it is the business of
science to correct and transform. Thus the object
of opinion at once is, and is not. It is a phenomenon
or appearance; and as the appearance both discloses
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 113
and hides the reality, as it “ half reveals and half
conceals the soul within,” it has an ambiguous
character, and may be regarded either as that which
prevents us from attaining to knowledge, or as that
which is the necessary and only means of attaining
to it. It becomes a hindrance, in so far as the
appearance is taken for the reality; and in this point
of view the great effort of science is to rise above
opinion, to tear away the illusive veil which it casts
over the truth, and to grasp the permanent unity
which is disguised in its changing forms. Hence
opinion is sometimes represented as a kind of dream
in which shadows are taken for substances. 1 “He
who recognises the existence of beautiful objects but
not of beauty itself, and is not capable of perceiving it
even if it be pointed out to him, does he not seem to
live in a perpetual dream rather than in waking
reality ? ” 2 Eor in no one of the particular objects
to which he ascribes beauty is the principle of beauty
adequately realised: and so it is with all the other
principles of unity. “Of all the many beautiful
things there is none which may not appear ugly,
of the many just acts none that may not appear
unjust, of the many equals none that in another
relation may not appear unequal. 73 3 And the reason
is that, while beauty, justice and equality have
definite natures, and while each of them is one self-
1 Symp 192 d. 2 Rep., 476 c. 3 Id., 479 a.
VOL I. H
114
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
identical thing, in their particular presentments,
where they are confused with one another and with
the subjects in which they appear, they take manifold
and diverse forms . 1
When he is dwelling upon this point of view
Plato sometimes seems almost, if not altogether,
to fall back upon the unmediated opposition of
knowledge and ignorance as it was conceived by
Socrates. The ideal reality of things is represented
as existing in eternal self-identity, as the one beyond
the many, or as the permanent substance which is far
removed from all the variableness of the phenomena.
Thus, especially in some passages of the Phaedo , opinion
is set in direct antithesis to science, and the negative
relation of the latter to the former is insisted upon in
language which approximates to the utterances of
eastern mysticism. The idea in its pure nature, it
is alleged, is not seen until we have purged away
all the imperfections and irrelevancies which attach
to its particular embodiments ; and this means also
that the mind that would grasp it must altogether
free itself from the dominion of the senses. It will
be observed that these two, the objective and .the
subjective aspects of Plato’s idealism, go together
and imply each other. The ideal type is a de-
finite form, a pure universal in which there is no
variableness of aspect or compounding of different
1 Rep., 470 4 .
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 115
elements, but a transparent and unchanging unity.
But, as such, it is invisible, and cannot be presented
to sense or imagination, but only grasped by the
intelligence: and the intelligence which grasps it
must itself be of kindred nature to it. Furthermore,
even the intelligence can only grasp such a unity
when it withdraws into itself from the confusions of
sense which distract and disturb its pure activity.
For “when in its perception of things it uses the
body as its instrument, apprehending through sight
or hearing or any other sense, then it is dragged
down by the body into the region of things that
never maintain their identity; it wanders and is
confused, and loses control of itself, and is as it
were intoxicated, because it is dealing with things
that have no stability in themselves. But when it
returns into itself and reflects, it passes into another
region, the region of that which is pure and ever-
lasting, immortal and unchangeable; and feeling its
kindred thereto, it dwells there under its own control
and has rest from its wandering, and is constant and
one with itself, as are the objects with which it
deals” 1 From this point of view the body is a kind
of tomb of the soul from which it can rise only at
death, and the whole life of the philosopher has to
be conceived as a practice for that final moment in
which it shall free itself from this “muddy vesture
l Phaedo , 79 c.
116 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
of decay ” that doth so “grossly close it in,” and
hinder it from the vision of the intelligible world.
It is in such passages as these that we find the
strongest support for the common conception of
Plato’s idealism as a kind of apotheosis of abstrac-
tions, an attempt to find the truth of things in the
most general and therefore empty predicates which we
attach to them. Further, this conception of Plato’s
meaning is favoured by the circumstance that he has
usually been read under the influence of the un-
sympathetic criticism of Aristotle, or through the
interpretations of the Neo-Platonists, who could
appreciate only the negative aspect of his philosophy.
We have, however, to observe, in the first place, that
Plato, even in the passages where he goes farthest in
the direction of mysticism, constantly upholds the
doctrine that opinion is not ignorance but imperfect
knowledge, and that it is only through opinion, which
is mediated by sense, that we can rise to a knowledge
of the ideal reality of things. We know ideas at first
only as predicates of particular objects, though really
they are absolute types to which these objects are
never adequate, which they recall, but of which they
necessarily fall short. Thus when we give the predi-
cate of equality to two material objects, we are
attributing to them something to which they may
approximate but which they never exactly attain.
The pure mathematical relation can never be
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 117
adequately realised in sensible experience, though
it is constantly suggested by it. And the same is
the case with such predicates as 'beautiful , 5 ‘ just,’
'holy , 5 and so on. No particular thing can realise
the type, though every one suggests or recalls it ; and
indeed it could not become an object of our con-
sciousness unless it did so. And “ must we not allow
that when any one, looking at an object, observes
that the thing which he sees aims at being some
other thing, but falls short of, and cannot be that
other — he who makes the observation must have had
a previous knowledge of that to which the other,
though similar, was inferior ? 55 1
Setting aside the idea of Reminiscence, what Plato
here puts before us is that we always know the
particular through, and in relation to, a universal,
which has a wider import. The universal is, therefore,
logically prior to the particular, in the sense that in
apprehending the particular we presuppose it ; though
it is also true that it is not till later that we direct
attention to the universal for itself or attempt to
define it.
But, in the second place, Plato’s view of the par-
ticular, as like the universal and therefore capable of
recalling it, is closely connected with his conception of
art and also with his idealisation of love. Art is for
him the great means of presenting the higher under
1 Phaed. J 74 d .
118 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
the form of the lower. Its business is to give to the
particular object of sense a form in which it will more
adequately represent its idea. In other words, art by
a kind of ‘ noble untruth 5 removes from the object all
the imperfections of finitude and makes it serve as
a substitute for the idea itself. Art and poetry
bring down the idea into the region of ordinary
experience, and make it a presence in the sensible
world for those who cannot raise their minds above
that world to the intelligible reality of which it is
but a semblance. And the same may be said of
natural beauty. For, as Plato says in the Phaedrus ,
the beautiful is the form in which the ideal comes
nearest to the senses, and is presented most vividly
to the ordinary consciousness ; 1 while the purely
ethical and intellectual ideal has at first no form
or comeliness that can commend it to the sense or
imagination. And his explanation of the passion of
love is that it arises just from that confusion or
identification of the ideal with the sensible, of the
universal with the particular, which beauty seems to
authorise. Hence in the Symposium Plato gives us
the picture of a process of education or elevation of
the soul, which begins in the wonder and desire pro-
duced by the outward beauty of one finite individual ;
and which rises by gradual stages from the body to
the soul, from one to all beautiful forms, till it finds
1 Phaedrus, 250 c.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 119
at last its perfect satisfaction in the contemplation
of the ideal principle of beauty itself . 1
In this way Plato seems to pass from a negative
to a positive view of the relations of the particular
to the universal, from the mystic longing to be freed
from the bonds of sense to the recognition that the
madness of the poet and the lover, who see the ideal
in the sensible, has in it something of divine inspira-
tion. But this is not all. Aristotle brings against
Plato the charge that he sought the one beyond the
many instead of seeking it in the many. But science,
as Aristotle himself recognises , 2 must necessarily do
both. It must go beyond the phenomena with which
it starts in order to explain them. If it seeks a
principle of unity in the diversity of the things of
experience, it must isolate the particular aspect or
sphere of reality it is investigating from all that is
irrelevant to it or not immediately connected with
it. Thus the geometrician has to free his figures
from every characteristic that does not flow from
their definition as spatial forms or determinations of
abstract space ; and the arithmetician has to isolate
his numbers from every determination that does not
belong to them as discrete units, standing in external
relations to each other. The existence of such sciences
1 Symp., 210 a. seq.
2 Cf. Anal. Post., II. 19. 4k 6 5 i/nreiplas 7 ) 4k iravrbs ypefi^cravros
rod jca$6\ov ev rrj faxy, rod evos irapa ra wo\\d, 6 &v kv airacnv 4v
ivy iKehots to avro, rixvys apxy koll eTTUTTypLys.
120
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
depends on our being able to consider the relations
with which they deal apart from every other relation
— i.e. apart from everything that cannot be explained
by the principle of unity that governs the special
aspect or sphere of reality in question. And though
such abstraction cannot be so fully and definitely
attained in other cases, yet it remains true that in
every science we have to deal with a special aspect or
sphere of reality ; and that in order to deal with it
successfully, we have to abstract as far as possible
from all that is unconnected with its immediate
object. In other words, we seek to free each science
from irrelevancies, and to make it into a transparent
body of truth, each part of which implies the whole.
In many cases we may not be able perfectly to realise
such a systematic unity, but it is the ideal we have
always to strive after. For knowledge can hardly
be regarded as worthy of the name of science till it
ceases to be a collection of facts, and begins to take
the form of an organic whole, all the elements of
which are determined by the same principle of unity.
Now, if Plato’s f one beyond the many’ meant
this — and we shall find reason to maintain that it
did so — it is not liable to the objection that its
unity is a mere abstraction. A science must abstract
from what is irrelevant to its special point of view,
in order that it may work out more fully and
definitely what in that point of view is relevant.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 121
It must abstract from all that is not connected with
its own specific aim, or included in the specific sphere
of existence it has to investigate, in order that it
may take as complete a view as possible of all that
contributes to that aim, or falls within that sphere.
And — subject to a qualification to be explained in
the sequel — the Platonic ideas may be fairly inter-
preted in this sense; for by an idea Plato means
something which can be defined, and from the
definition of which consequences can be drawn, i.e.
he means not a bare unit but a unity of differences,
not a simple abstraction which excludes all distinction,
but a content whose elements, though distinguishable,
are yet in transparent unity with each other. When,
therefore, he speaks of the exclusion of multiplicity
and change from his ideas and from the science of
them, what he means to express is that, when we
reach the inmost nature of anything we find in
it, not parts that are external to each other, or phases
that merely succeed each other, but a whole, the
elements of which are recognised as essentially con-
nected with each other. In other words, what he
is aiming at is not the negation of all difference,
but only of differences that do not flow from
one principle or are not involved in it. This
seems to be the real meaning of Plato, though we
have to acknowledge that at this stage of his
development he dwells too exclusively upon the
122
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
negative aspect of science, upon the permanent unity
and simplicity of the idea as opposed to the
multiplicity and variableness of the phenomena; and
that his language, especially in the Phaedo, might
encourage the notion that all that is necessary to
attain the ideal is to turn away from the world of
sense and opinion. His mind, in fact, is occupied
almost wholly with the movement upwards to appre-
hend the principles of unity in things, and hardly
at all with the movement downwards to reconstitute
the phenomena by a new interpretation. And this
over-emphasis, natural as it might be in the first effort
to rise from opinion to science, inevitably led to the
misunderstanding to which we have referred — a mis-
understanding which seems to have arisen at an early
period in the Platonic school itself, and which in his
later dialogues Plato seeks to correct. Whether he
ever completely corrected it so as to exclude the error
of mysticism, or whether he was finally driven to
admit an irreconcilable division between the world
of sense and the world of intelligence, we shall have
to consider hereafter.
In the meantime we must go on to deal with a
second point, in which theology is vitally interested,
namely, that for Plato, even in this earliest form of
the ideal theory, all ideas form a whole, and point
to one highest idea which includes or absorbs all
the others into itself. For in Plato’s philosophy, as
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 123
already stated, the conceptions of Socrates are in
such wise deepened, enlarged, and universalised,
that the ideal principle which Socrates sought to
introduce into morals is made the basis of a philosophy
of the universe. In accordance with this view we
find in the Phaedo a kind of transfigured rendering
of the fact, vouched for by Xenophon, that Socrates
at one period of his life had occupied himself with
the physical theories of the earlier philosophers, but
had finally turned away from them to investigate
the ethical principle by which the conduct of man
must be regulated. Plato accommodates this fact
to his own case, and makes Socrates turn away
from the theory of Anaxagoras — who, though he
had spoken of reason as the ordering principle
of all things, had nevertheless adhered to the methods
of explanation which were employed by the other
physical philosophers — to the principles and methods
of his own idealism. Thus the Platonic Socrates
tells us that there was a time when he was content
to explain all phenomena by physical causes, treating
e.g. the growth of animals as the result of some
interaction* of heat and cold, and even the perception
and thought of man as due to the action of the
blood or the air on the matter of the brain. But
he soon began to find a difficulty in such explana-
tions ; for he found it impossible to understand how
the unity of life and mind should be produced by
124 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
the combination and reciprocal influence of the
material parts of the body. He therefore began to
doubt what before had seemed a “ self-evident truth,
that the growth of a man is simply the result of
eating and drinking, and that, when by the digestion
of food flesh is added to flesh and bone to bone,
the lesser bulk becomes larger and the small man
great/’ 1
Socrates could not see how such a process would
explain the facts. Nay, he could not see how such
an hypothesis would explain any ideal unity what-
ever, not even that which is involved in the art of
arithmetic. “ I could not satisfy myself that when
one is added to one, the one to which the addition
is made becomes two, simply by reason of the addi-
tion.” 2 In other words, as Kant afterwards pointed
out, there is a synthetic principle involved even in
the operations of arithmetic, a principle of connexion
which mediates in the addition of one element to
another ; and we cannot say that the mere bringing
of the terms together will explain this process,
unless we can find some connective idea by means
of which they are reduced to unity. Plato thus, as
it appears, opens up the general question of the
need of synthetic principles; and that not only for
the explanation of life and mind, but wherever, in
thought or in things, we discover a real unification
1 Phctedo, 96 d. 2 Phaedo, 96 e.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 125
of elements which seem in the first instance to be
given as diverse.
Socrates then goes on to tell ns that, while
troubled with this difficulty, he heard of a book
by Anaxagoras which seemed to promise such an
explanation of the universe as he wanted, a
book in which it was maintained that reason is
the disposer and cause of all things. “ I was de-
lighted at this notion and I said to myself: ‘if
mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all things
for the best, and put each particular thing in the
right place’: and I argued that, if anyone discovered
the cause of the generation or distribution or exist-
ence of anything, he must find out what state of
being, doing, or suffering, was best for it: and there-
fore a man need only consider the best for himself
and others, and then he would also know the
worst, since the same science comprehended both.” 1
In other words, Socrates expected to get from
Anaxagoras a teleological system of the universe,
which would solve the problem of ethics as a neces-
sary element in its general explanation of reality.
But when he read the book, he found that Anaxa-
goras had assigned for the causes and reasons of things
only the particular elements and their actions and
reactions upon each other ; and that he had not in
any way attempted to explain the universe, or indeed
1 Phaedo, 97 C.
126 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
anything in it, as a whole, the elements of which
were united by one teleological principle.
“I might compare Anaxagoras to a person who began
by maintaining that mind is the cause of the actions
of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to ex-
plain the causes of my several actions in detail,
went on to show that I sit here because my body
is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones,
as he would say, are hard and have joints that divide
them, and the muscles are elastic and they cover
the bones, which also have a covering or environ-
ment of flesh and skin which contains them: and
as the bones are lifted at their joints by the con-
traction and relaxation of the muscles, I am able
to bend my joints, and this is the reason why I
am sitting here in . a curved posture : — that is what
he would say ; and he would have a similar ex-
planation of my talking to you, which he would
attribute to sound and ear and hearing, and he
would assign ten thousand other causes of the
same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause,
which is that the Athenians have thought fit to
condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it
better to remain here and undergo my sentence :
for I am inclined to think that these muscles and
bones of mine would have gone off long ago to
Megara or Boeotia — by the dog they would, if they
had been moved only by their own idea of what
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 127
is best, and if I had not chosen the better and
nobler part, instead of playing truant and running
away, to endure any punishment which the State
inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of
causes and conditions in all this. It may be said,
indeed, that without muscles and bones and the
other parts of the body I cannot execute my pur-
poses. But to say that I do this because of them,
and that this is the way the mind acts, and not
from a choice of the best, is a very careless and
idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot
distinguish the cause from the condition, which the
many, feeling about in the dark, are always mis-
taking and misnaming.” 1
Socrates expected from Anaxagoras a theory of
the universe as an order based not merely upon
law but upon design, not upon efficient, but upon
final causes. He had expected that Anaxagoras
would reduce the order of the universe to a system
arranged in view of an absolute good : or, to put
it otherwise, that he would explain the world as an
intelligible world, the beginning and end of which were
to be found in the intelligence. But he soon perceived
that in his explanations of particular things Anaxa-
goras had really followed the same method as his
predecessors, the method of physical causes ; that in
other words, he had dealt only with the particular
1 Phaedo f 98 c. seq.
128
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
relations of things as they seemed to present them-
selves to the senses, and had sought only to
determine how they acted and reacted upon each
other. Now, this method, in Plato's opinion, was
doomed to failure: for, as he puts it, when we gaze
upon the world with the eyes of sense our minds
are confused and dazzled as by the sun in eclipse.
Hence it is not in this way that we can hope to
rise to the principle of unity in the universe, or
even to the principle of unity in any part of it.
Being thus disappointed in the high hopes which he
had entertained of Anaxagoras, the Platonic Socrates
is represented as turning, as a secondary resource, to
the theory of ideas and the method of dialectic ; 1
that is, he is represented as turning to the Socratic
method of induction and definition as it had been
recast by Plato himself. That method, he thought,
would ultimately bring him in another way to the
result which he desired: for it would enable him,
in the first place, to attain to the definition of the
general predicates by which we characterise par-
ticular classes of things, and so to the discovery of
the principles which explain particular spheres of
reality ; and then, in the second place, if doubt
were thrown on any one of the principles so estab-
lished, it would enable him to make a further regress
upon some higher universal which he would endea-
1 See note at tlie end of this lecture.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 129
vour to define by the same method: and thus he
would proceed step by step till he reached a highest
principle by which he could explain all the others.
An ideal principle reached in this way would not be
a mere name — like the ordering mind in the system
of Anaxagoras ; it would be seen to be the one prin-
ciple of unity in which all the differences of things
found their reconcilement and solution. This con-
ception of a Jacob’s ladder of science leading up to
the highest idea, which is indicated in the Phaedo
only by a few pregnant words, is worked out more
fully in the Republic, where Plato gives his view
of the special sciences as preparing the way for the
final science of dialectic or philosophy. The sciences
— Plato speaks particularly of the mathematical
sciences which alone had been developed in his time
— are there described as each finding its principle in
some one idea which has to be separated from every-
thing irrelevant, and developed to all its conse-
quences. Each of these sciences deals with a whole
or sphere of reality which is only a part in the
greater whole of the universe, and its principle
is therefore a hypothesis which must rest upon
something else than itself. Hence to reach an
absolute principle we must take a synthetic view
of the principles of all the sciences, and seek for
the idea which is at the basis of them all; for
only one who can see things in their unity is worthy
VOL. I. I
130
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
to be called a dialectician or philosopher. Thus the
true method is to go back from particulars to uni-
versal, and from these to still higher universal,
till we reach the highest universal, the principle
that binds them all together and has no principle
beyond it — the Idea of Good which is the light of
the intelligible, as the sun is the light of the sensible
world.
Now, without entering at present upon the dis-
cussion of Plato’s Idea of Good as it is presented in
the Republic, let us consider the general contrast of
methods which he here sets before us. Plato rejects
the view of Anaxagoras because, though reason was
his nominal principle, he did not, on the basis of
it, work out a conception of the world as an in-
telligble, or, what is the same thing for Plato, a teleo-
logical system — an organic whole, in which the Good
which is the essential aim of reason is realised. On
the contrary, he fell back upon an explanation of
phenomena by the special relations of the parts of
the world, as acting and reacting upon each other
according to physical laws which might be discovered
by observation. Such a method could never, in
Plato’s opinion, lead to a final explanation of things;
nor, however far it was carried, could it verify the
assertion of Anaxagoras that the world is the mani-
festation of intelligence. But Plato thought that his
own method of ideas, the method of dialectic and
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 131
definition, if it were steadfastly pursued, would ulti-
mately lead to the desired result, would carry the
mind up from idea to idea till it reached the Idea
of Good, as the most comprehensive of all principles
from which all other principles might be deduced,
and would thus enable us to conceive the world as
a rational system.
Now, this scheme of Plato is apt to be regarded
as only an attempt to substitute the barren pursuit
of final causes for the fruitful ways of science. And,
in a sense, we must admit the truth of the charge.
Plato did not understand, and could not anticipate,
how much science was to gain by the method he re-
pudiates, the method which begins with isolated facts
or elements of reality and aims only at finding out
the laws of their action and reaction upon each other.
Further, we have to admit that it was impossible
for science to advance very far in the way which
Plato preferred, by the direct attempt to discover
formal or final causes. Not even in the case of
the organic world, where final causes have their
most natural application, could satisfactory results
be reached by such a method. Even there we must
begin with the use of lower categories, with the
second causes or conditions on which Plato looks
so slightingly. We must analyse the whole into its
parts, and try to discover the ways in which these
severed parts act and react on each other. To
132 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
comprehend the living being as a whole or organism is
the last, and not the first, thing in science. In this
respect Plato’s view is like that of Groethe, who objected
to the analytic work of science that it f murders in
order to dissect/ and that in the end it leaves us
with the parts in our hands, while the spiritual
bond, that held them together and made them parts
of one living being, has disappeared in the process.
Yes, it may be answered, in the end we cannot
explain life by the action of the parts of the dead
body. But it is not less true that we must
begin by dissecting, we must analyse the organism
into its parts, else we shall never know much
about it. If, indeed, after we have dissected and
have the parts in our hands, we think that we
have done all that is required, or that we can
explain the animal fully by the mechanical and
chemical relations of its parts — still more if we
think we can explain mind on such a method — then
we shall deserve Plato’s censure ; but, on the other
hand, he deserves ours, for his attempt at once to
attain the ultimate secret, and for his contempt of
the process of analysis which is the necessary pre-
supposition of any conclusive synthesis. Plato does,
indeed, introduce a saving clause ; for while, in the
passage just quoted, he declares that the mechani-
cal conditions of the actions of man or any other
being, are not the real causes of these actions,
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 133
he admits that they are conditions without which
the real causes would not operate. But if this be
true, these conditions also require investigation, and
it will not do to pass them over, or treat them as
something which may be taken for granted. Indeed,
it is only after we have mastered the nature of the
parts taken in isolation or as externally acting upon
each other, that it is safe to go on to recognise that
after all they are not isolated, nor is their relation
merely external. It is just when analysis has
done its work as completely as possible, that we
become clearly conscious that no final account of
such a being can be given, till we have discovered
the one principle that manifests itself in all its
differences, and binds them into one organic whole.
So far I have spoken of organic beings in the
narrower sense; but Plato maintains that the same
thing is true of all forms of existence, and of the
universe itself. He maintains, in other words, that
we can never get an ultimate explanation of anything
by the method of the physical philosophers. For all
things, so far as they are independent realities, are in
a sense organic, i.e. they are systematic wholes, in
which we have to explain the difference from the
unity and not the unity from the difference, the parts
from the whole, not the whole from the parts. Even
in mathematics, we cannot explain the unity — say of
a geometrical figure — by a synthesis of parts which
134 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
are external to each other; we must, on the con-
trary, first define the unity, and then deduce the
correlation of the parts from it. We cannot see e.g.
what a triangle is, unless we are able to deduce all
its distinctive characteristics from its definition. No
ultimate explanation of anything can be given, if we
accept the principles of Plato, except by the discovery
of its formal or final cause.
But admitting all this, we must still maintain that
no such reconstruction of the parts from the idea of
the whole can be attained without a previous investiga-
tion of the parts in their distinction and their external
relations. Teleology may not under all circumstances
be a barren study, but it must be barren to anyone
who is not prepared to go through the patient labour
of dissection and analysis. Plato’s main defect is
that he anticipates the end or ultimate result of
philosophy, and that he does not realise the magni-
tude and slowness of the mining process of science
through which it is to be reached. And perhaps we
may add that it is just because of his hasty antici-
pation of the ultimate ideal view of reality which is
the goal of science, that his idealism finally remained
imperfect, and that both he and his great follower
Aristotle were obliged to recognise the existence of
something in the world which could not be ideally
explained. A philosophy that would be thorough
in its idealism, must stoop from the intuition of
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 135
the whole to the detailed investigation of the parts;
it must wait for the complete realisation of its ideal
principles till science has reduced the scattered
phenomena into a system of necessarily, though it
may be externally, related elements. The revolt of
science against a premature teleology was a necessary
step in the very history of the process by which
in modern times philosophy has been advancing to
a more complete teleological view of the universe.
NOTE ON PLATO’S RELATION TO ANAXAGORAS.
The point of Plato’s argument in this part of the dialogue
has, I think, been often misapprehended. The Platonic
Socrates tells us that he went to the book of Anaxagoras with
great expectations, because he had heard that Anaxagoras
maintained that reason is the principle of all things. He
found, however, on reading that book that Anaxagoras had in
the main followed the method of the physical philosophers, and
that in his explanations of phenomena he started with the
particular elements or existences given in sense, and only
sought to discover how they acted and reacted on each other.
In short, Anaxagoras had at once, as by an immediate intuition,
assumed a highest principle of the universe, but had then been
unable to make any scientific use of that principle. Socrates,
therefore, renounced such ambitious ways of philosophising,
and fell hack, as a Setirepos ttXovs, on his own humbler ways of
speculation ; as one whose eyes had been blinded by gazing
directly at the sun during an eclipse, might turn to look at
its image in water, or some similar medium. “ This,” says
Socrates, “ was what was in my mind : I was afraid lest my soul
might be blinded altogether, if I continued to look at things
with my eyes, or tried to apprehend them by help of my
senses. I thought, therefore, that I ought to take refuge
136
THE NATURE OF IDEAS
cis roils \6yovs (i.e. in his own method of explaining things by
ideal principles), and contemplate the truth of things in them.” 1
“Yet, perhaps,” he goes on, “my metaphor is not very exact,
for I do not admit that he who contemplates things iv rot s
\6yois is looking at mere images, any more than he who looks
at them h rots tpyots” i.e. who observes particulars and their
relations as they are given in sense, without rising above them
to the universal.
The meaning of this will become evident if we remember
that Plato is giving a new version of the fact stated by Xeno-
phon, namely, that Socrates turned away from the speculations
of earlier philosophy, which had been based upon observation
of the outward world, to practise his own method of seeking
for the definition of universals in the sphere of ethics. 2 Plato
here makes two changes in the story in order to fit it to his
own case. In the first place, he ignores the limitation of the
Socratic philosophy to ethics ; and, in the second place, he
conceives universals in the light of his own ideal theory,
i.e. as principles at once of knowledge and of reality.
Making these changes, Plato contrasts his own method of
referring things to universal principles by aid of the
intelligence, with that of Anaxagoras, who sought at a
single stroke to reach the highest principle, and yet, after
all, looked at the world only with the eyes of sense, which
could apprehend nothing but particular things and their
relations. It is a touch of Plato's humour that he speaks
of his own method, which rises gradually from the definition
of lower to the definition of higher universals, as a Setfrepoy
TrXoOy; and, again, that he describes himself as dazzled, as by
the “sun in eclipse,” when he looks at things with the eyes
of sense, and as, therefore, turning for relief to the reflexion
of things in thought. He has used nearly the same language
in a passage a little earlier in the dialogue (79 b), where
he declares that one who tries to apprehend reality by
means of the senses “ is disturbed and distracted and staggers
like a drunken man,” and contrasts with this the pure and
1 Phaedo , 99 e.
2 Mem. , I. 1, 11 seq .
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 137
tranquil action of the intelligence, when it contemplates the
eternal ideas of things. Plato, we may be satisfied, would never
have spoken in earnest of his own dialectic as an inferior
method, though it was less ambitious than that of a philoso-
pher who at once asserted the absolute supremacy of reason
without working up to this highest universal through any
subordinate principles of unity. And, indeed, Plato takes care
to guard against such a mistake, when he declares that the
metaphor of reflexion does not hold good, and that we do
not see reality less directly ev tois \6yoi$ than £v rots fyyois,
i.e. through intelligence than through sense. In fact, he
believes the reverse of this ; he believes that we apprehend
the reality of things only as we rise above the particular
phenomena of sense and their immediate relations to each other,
to the universals or ideal principles of unity, which can only
be apprehended by the intelligence. The meaning of the whole
passage, then, is that in Plato’s opinion we can by the per-
ceptions of sense reach, at the most, only the physical causes
or conditions of things, and that the final or formal causes,
which alone he thinks worthy of the name of causes at all, can
be grasped only by the intelligence. It will be observed that
Plato does not here dispute the theory that we can apprehend
particular things and their relations by sense alone, and there-
fore does not distinguish between sensation and opinion. A
different doctrine would result from the discussions of the
Theaetetus , but these seem to belong to a later stage of the
Platonic philosophy.
iC Endeavouring to show the kind of cause I deal with,” the
Platonic Socrates goes on, “ I fall back upon those ideal prin-
ciples about which there has been so much talk, and I make
them my starting-point. In other words, I assume that there is
a beautiful in itself, a good in itself, and so on. And if yon grant
me this, I find in it a sufficient basis for my argument.” Plato
thus assumes that the ultimate cause or reason for any charac-
teristic of a particular thing, is to be found in some universal
or idea, and that “ if there be anything beautiful but the beau-
tiful itself, it must be for no other reason than that it partakes
in the beautiful.” ... “I know and can understand nothing
138 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
of these other wise causes that are alleged, and if any one says
to me that the hloom of colour in an object, or its shape, or any
such quality of it is the source of its beauty, I leave all that,
and singly and simply and perhaps foolishly I hold to the eon-
viction that nothing makes a thing beautiful, but the presence,
or participation, or communication — whichever you like to call
it — of the beautiful itself. For I am not prepared to speak
definitely of the nature of the relation between the beautiful
itself and the particular things we call beautiful, but only to
assert that it is from the beautiful itself that all particular
things derive their beauty ” 1
The ideas, then, are to be taken as constitutive principles of
reality within particular spheres of being, and their definition
is the only key to the distinctive characteristics of those
spheres. “ Laying down, then, the principle,” i.e. the definition
of a universal, “ that seems to me to be surest, what agrees there-
with I set down as true, and what does not agree therewith, I
set down as untrue. . . . And if anyone assails 2 * * * * the principle
(£7r60eo-is) itself, you will not mind him or answer him, till you
have discovered as to all the consequences which followed from
it, whether they agree with each other ” ; in other words, you
wiLl try to work out a self-consistent view on the basis of a
particular hypothesis, and will not reject it except on the
ground that this cannot be done. But Plato does not stop here,
he requires that the philosopher shall rise beyond principles
that hold good within special spheres of being, to a highest
1 Phaedo, 100 D.
2 There is an obvious difficulty in getting this meaning out of $X OLTO )
but whatever the reading ought to be, the meaning seems assured by
what is said immediately afterwards about the Eristic who confuses the
discussion of a principle, taken by itself, with the discussion of its
consequences. The discussion of a principle in itself must mean the
enquiry whether it can be treated as an ultimate principle. Thus the
principle of a special science is that idea which furnishes a basis for a
self-consistent view of that sphere or aspect of reality. The idea of
number e.g. may furnish a sufficient basis tor arithmetic, but we cannot
take it as an ivvir 60eros apx 7 ? : when we examine it for itself, we are
forced to carry it back to some more comprehensive idea.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 139
principle of unity. Hence he says : “ When you are required
to give an explanation of the principle itself, you will go on
to set up a higher principle— the best you can discover
among those next in the ascending scale— and so on to one
that is higher still, till you reach one that is sufficient for
itself. And you will take special care not, like the Eristics, to
confuse the discussion of the principle itself, with that of the
consequences which follow from it : so only you can hope to
attain distinct results about that which really is.” 1
This, as I understand it, points to a hierarchical distribution of
ideas in which the highest idea is conceived as the ultimate
ground of all the others. Thus the dwHderos apx'rj is that to
which we work back on the basis of what Aristotle calls the
WLcu apxcu, the latter being regarded as hypothetical in the sense
that they find their ultimate ground or principle of explanation
in the former. This, however, is not worked out in the Phaedo ,
where Plato does not yet show that by his own method, he is
able to reach the Idea of Good as the principle of all knowing
and being. Here Plato confines himself to the lower ideas,
insisting specially on the point that we must proceed by
setting up definitions of special universals, and working out the
consequences of such definitions, to see how they cohere with
each other. The truth, so far, is to be tested by the coherence
or self-consistency of the view which our definition enables us to
take of the special sphere, or, as we should rather say, the
special aspect of reality included under a universal. In the last
resort, however, we must recognise that such universals are not
ultimate, and that every subordinate principle must be referred
back to some higher principle, and that again to one that is
still higher, till we reach that which is adequate , or, as we
should rather say, self-sufficient.
1 Phaedo, 101 d seq>
LECTURE SIXTH.
THE STATE AND THE IDEA OE GOOD.
We have now reached the point at which Plato’s
philosophy passes into theology, in so far as all the
ideas are made to centre and culminate in one
absolute ideal principle. This result is specially
associated with the B&public, that treatise of Plato’s
manhood in which he sums up all the conclusions
he had then attained on morals and politics,
on metaphysics and religion, and endeavours to weld
them into a connected whole. It is impossible
within any moderate compass to give a complete
estimate of this great book, but for our purpose it
is only necessary to refer to one or two leading
features of it. Perhaps it might best be described
as a treatise on Education, regarded as the one great
business of life from the beginning to the end of
it. But it lays emphasis on one aspect of this
education which had been quite secondary with
Socrates, and was altogether neglected by the Minor
THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD 141
Socratics, namely, that it is the education of a social
being, and therefore must be realised, in the first
instance at least, through society. Plato, therefore,
tries to imagine a perfect community after the
highest type he knew, that of the Greek City-State.
As an organised society the State, in his view, is
founded neither on the force of the strong man, nor
on the conspiracy of the weak; it is not the crea-
tion of arbitrary choice, even in the form of a social
contract between its individual members; it origi-
nates not in the will of men at all, but in their
nature, as beings who are essentially parts of a whole,
each in himself fragmentary and incomplete, hut find-
ing his necessary complement in the rest. For such
beings, to be isolated is to be weak and undeveloped,
to be united is to be strong and have their individual
capacities drawn out in the service of each other.
For such beings, therefore, the ideal of individualism,
the ideal of self-seeking and self-aggrandisement,
is suicidal and contradictory. It is only as they
give themselves up to the general good that indi-
viduals can possibly attain their own, and to seek
happiness merely for themselves is the way to lose
it. They must die to themselves that they may
live in the general life. In short, it is only in the
discharge of their social duty that they can be in
harmony with themselves; and any attempt to make
the general life of the community subservient to
142 THE STATE AND
their own, must lead to inner discord, disorganisa-
tion and misery. Thus the ideal which Plato sets
before us is that of a perfectly unified society, in
which each individual, confining himself strictly to
his own function, shall in that function be a pure
organ and expression of the general will.
Plato has thus risen to the organic idea of the
State, as a union of men which is based upon the
division of labour according to capacity, and in
which the citizen is united to the whole by the
special office he discharges. But in working out
this idea in the form of the Greek City-State, he
lands himself in two great inconsistencies. On the
one hand, sharing, as he does, in the Greek view
that the higher life is only for the few — for those
who are capable of intellectual culture, and in pro-
portion as they are capable of it — he is unable to
conceive the lower classes, those engaged in agricul-
tural or industrial labour, as organic members of
the State ; he is obliged to regard them as the
instruments of a society in whose higher advantages
they have no share. And, on the other hand, he is
so solicitous to exclude all self-seeking, and directly
to merge private in social good, that he deprives
even the favoured citizens of personal rights, and
destroys the family lest it should become the rival
of the State. He thus seems to secure the unity
of the State, not by subordinating the personal and
THE IDEA OF GOOD 143
private interests of its members, but rather by pre-
venting any consciousness of such interests from
arising; and the result is that he reduces it to a
mechanical, instead of raising it to a spiritual or
organic unity. In the reaction against the indi-
vidualistic tendencies represented by the Sophists,
he finds no way to maintain order except by the
absolute suppression of individual freedom.
At the same time, this is not the whole truth,
and it could not be the whole truth for one taught
in the school of Socrates. Plato, indeed, made a
great change in the views of his master, when he
recognised that virtue cannot rest primarily upon
scientific knowledge, but only upon what he calls
right opinion, that is to say, upon a moral senti-
ment which is in great part the result of social
training. The virtue of the mass of men at all
times, and of all men in the earlier part of
their lives, must be the product, not of philosophic
reflexion, but of the unconscious influences under
which they grow up as members in a society, and
of a teaching which has no scientific character. Yet
Plato could not but hold that in its highest sense
‘ virtue is knowledge, 5 i.e . that it must rest upon
conscious principle ; and that any other kind of
virtue — any virtue that is based upon rules whose
principle is not present to him who obeys them
— is inchoate and imperfect. If not for the mass
144 THE STATE AND
of men, yet for the chosen few, there must be a
complete liberation from the life of mere use and
wont. Nor, indeed, can the life of use and wont
produce its highest results, unless it is regulated by
the providence of governors who have risen above it,
and have attained to philosophic insight into the
meaning and object of man's existence. The affairs
of men will never be perfectly ordered “ unless philo-
sophers be kings or kings philosophers/’ What is
wanted for the perfecting of the moral life is not,
therefore, as Socrates taught, that all individuals
should be able to guide themselves by a clear re-
flective consciousness of the end of all human action
and of the means whereby it may be attained ; it is
only that there should be a few individuals in the
State — even .one might be enough — who have such a
consciousness, and who are thereby fitted to become
shepherds of men, and to guide and mould the lives
of all the others. These wise governors, like Car-
lyle’s 'hero-kings,’ will have the duty of selecting for
each of the citizens the office which he individually
is suited to discharge, and giving to him the mental
and bodily training which he requires to discharge
it aright. They will have to keep away from the
lives of the citizens everything that is discordant and
inharmonious, and to surround them with what is be-
coming and beautiful, so that healthful and inspiring
influences may reach them from every quarter. They
THE IDEA OF GOOD
145
will take the religion of the people under their care,
and will provide that the poetry and mythology —
the stories of gods and heroes through which truth
is first presented to the immature minds of the
young — shall be such as to suggest ideas of purity
and goodness; and they will banish from the State
all profane and licentious tales such as pollute the
pages of even the greatest of the Greek poets. For
in the ideal city the philosophic legislator cannot
permit the poet to follow his own sweet will, but
must stand by his side and exercise a censorship
over his works, so that nothing unseemly or unlaw-
ful may reach the ears of the citizens.
Thus the demand of Socrates, that morality should
be based on a clear reflective consciousness of the end
of action, is not renounced, but it is limited to the few
who stand at the head of the State. And no ques-
tion is raised as to the general doctrine, that the life
of society as a whole is to be guided by scientific
knowledge; though it is admitted that in a private
station men may do with something less. In modern
times even this modified form of the Socratic doctrine
would be challenged. What we now expect from ethi-
cal theory is that it should analyse and explain the
moral consciousness of the past and the present, but
not — except to a very limited extent — that it should
furnish a guide for the future. We recognise that
morality is progressive, and that in this progress.
VOL. i. k
146
THE STATE AND
the clear reflective consciousness of any form of life
is rather the last product of its development than
the beginning from which it starts. It is not given
to nations any more than to individuals to scheme out
the plan of their lives beforehand. What exists at
first is at most some intuitive perception which grows
clearer as it is brought into action, but which can be
fully understood only when it is completely realised.
And the attainment of definite knowledge — such
knowledge e.g. as Plato and Aristotle had of the
ethical basis of the Greek State — was an indication
that the work of that kind of State was all but ended,
and that men were advancing to other forms of
social and political life.
But neither Plato nor Aristotle could look at
the matter in this light. They were without the
general idea of progress, and to them the Greek
City-State was the rrepai vljy avTapiceias, the abso-
lute form of man’s ethical life, beyond which
nothing could be achieved. What seemed to them
possible was only that the lessons drawn from
the past experience of Greek politics might be used
to perfect the type, and produce a city in which all the
good points of Greek cities (especially of Athens and
Sparta) might be united, and all their mistakes
avoided. Plato perhaps faintly perceived that this
ideal State — this Sparta without its rudeness, this
Athens without its indiscipline — was a 7 roXirela iv
THE IDEA OF GOOD 147
ovpavcp, a pattern laid up in heaven and in the soul
of the philosopher. But neither he nor Aristotle
discerned that they were pouring new wine into old
bottles, and that, by the very fact that they were
able to theorise Greek political life so perfectly, they
were carried beyond it. They were putting more
into the framework of the City-State than it could
bear, and clothing a forecast of the future in the
forms of the past.
One of the points in which Plato’s overestimate of
the practical power of theory, and his defective com-
prehension of its real place in development, are shown
most clearly, is in his scheme for remoulding Greek
mythology and purifying it of all the elements which
seemed to hi m to be immoral or irreligious. He sees
no anachronism in placing the philosopher, who has
meditated on all the problems of speculative theology,
side by side with the poet, who gives imaginative
form to the mythology of a nation, and sings the
fresh songs that express its inchoate religious ideas.
He fails to discern that the creation of a mythology
could not be the work of an age of reflexion; and
that, even if per impossibile the poets could produce
such a mythology, neither they nor any State
authority could ever make it an object of belief.
The conditions which call forth such deep and
far-reaching speculations as those of Plato and
Aristotle are altogether inconsistent with the creative
148
THE STATE AND
spontaneity which gave rise to the legendary tales
of gods and heroes, and equally inconsistent with the
simple -uncritical faith that accepted them as truth.
It was natural, indeed, that a philosopher, who saw
how much had been done by poetry to excite and
educate the mind of Greece in the era when conscious
reflexion was at its minimum, should express a pious
wish that this great service could have been per-
formed in a less ambiguous way, without the inter-
mingling of so many weakening, and even immoral,
elements : but to suppose that in any circumstances
the miracle of the first great spontaneous outburst
of Greek poetic production could be repeated, and
repeated under the guidance of a fully developed
philosophical criticism, was an obvious anachronism.
A mythology cannot be produced of malice prepense ,
or by those who do not believe in the gods whose
actions they describe. The law of development
will not permit us to have the flower along with
the fruit, for the simple reason that the decay of
the flower is the condition of the appearance of the
fruit. And just because philosophy is the further
product of a consciousness which has already
expressed itself in a mythology, it is impossible that
the two should flourish together; still more that
the former should preside over the genesis of the
latter. There is, no doubt, a kind of poetry that
belongs to an age of reflexion; but it cannot be
THE IDEA OF GOOD 149
like the simple spontaneous song of an earlier time,
nor can it create the kind of myths in which the
popular imagination finds the first satisfaction of its
spiritual needs.
Plato's discussion of the poetic mythology of Greece
is one-sided and inadequate. He seems to condemn
it in a body as immoral and misleading; and he
makes no distinction between the crude and almost
savage stories which we find preserved in Hesiod,
and the bright picture of humanised divinities which
is set before us in Homer; nor does he recognise
the great advance both in an intellectual and in
a moral aspect which is involved in the latter. He
sees only that in both cases the gods are re-
presented as doing deeds which, by the developed
conscience of his own time, would be accounted
discreditable ; and he demands that divine beings
should always be represented as perfectly good and
also perfectly unchangeable — not noticing that at
least the latter of these two demands is incon-
sistent with the very existence of mythology. On
the other hand, he regards it as the business of
art and poetry to present the truths of ethics and
religion in a form suitable to minds that are yet
unripe and unfitted for the reflective processes of
science. In particular, he thinks that it is the
office of mythology to inculcate a simple faith in
the omnipotence of goodness upon those who are not
150
THE STATE AND
yet prepared to grapple with the problem of evil;
and in this poetic teaching he would have all the
perplexing difficulties of life evaded, and all incon-
venient facts suppressed. “ If they can he got to
believe us,” says Plato, “we shall tell our citizens
that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to
this time has there been any quarrelling among
citizens .” 1 Evil is to be kept out of sight, and, so
far as may be, treated as an impossibility. Poetry
is to tell its ‘noble untruth,’ and no scepticism
or criticism is to be allowed to breathe a breath of
suspicion upon it.
Now, it may be true, as Plato thinks, that faith
in God — a faith that good is stronger than evil,
and even that it is all-powerful — is the necessary
basis of our higher life, and that without some
such faith morality is apt to shrink into a hopeless
striving after an unattainable ideal, and must, there-
fore, cease to exercise its highest inspiring power.
To hold that what we regard as best and highest
is also the ultimate reality — the principle from
which all comes and on which all depends — is the
great religious spring of moral energy. Even from
early times the social union finds its consecration
in the idea that it is a union of men based on
their common relation to a god, who is the guardian
of the destinies of his people. On such a faith Plato
1 Rep., 378 o.
THE IDEA OF GOOD
151
would found his State. But his difficulty was that
the first form of the religious faith of Greece was,
in an ethical point of view, so imperfect, and that,
such as it was, it was rapidly disappearing before
the widening knowledge of men, and the loosening
of social bonds that went therewith. The civic State,
torn by faction, no longer rested securely on the
belief in its protective deities ; and even if the
State had remained what it was, the sympathies of
men had begun to reach beyond it. For this condi-
tion of things there seemed to be only two possible
remedies : either that the old ideal life of citizenship —
with all its wholesome narrowness of view, with all
the religious beliefs on which it rested — should be
restored, and that thus the thoughts and aims of
men should again be confined within the limits of
the microcosm of the city ; or, if this were impossible,
then philosophy must face all the wider problems
suggested by the knowledge and experience of the
new time, all the difficulties that had arisen out of
the hard facts of life, and especially out of the
existence and prevalence of evil, and it must find
some way of explaining them in consistency with
the idea that good is the ultimate reality. Either
the course of civilisation must be turned backward,
so as to revive the 'good old times 5 of the fighters of
Marathon, as was the dream of Aristophanes ; or else
— as a pupil of Socrates might rather be expected
152
THE STATE AND
to hold — philosophy must take account of the reasons
upon which pessimistic views of life may be based,
and must find its way to an optimism that has an
answer for them all.
Now, Plato— and this is what constitutes the
peculiar characteristic of the view which he presents
in the BejovMic — does not adopt one of these
alternatives to the exclusion of the other, hut in
a way accepts them both: the former for the
benefit of the citizens in general, the latter for the
philosophic rulers. Eor the many, he would restore
in a higher form the order of the Greek municipal
State, in which the citizen, disciplined in civic
virtue and patriotic self-devotion, inspired by a
purified mythology, and surrounded by beautiful
forms of art — aesthetic types of goodness and purity —
should live a life of faith, sheltered from all doubt
and intellectual difficulty. And, on the other banfi^
for the philosophic few who had outgrown the stage
of culture in which the mind can be fed with
imaginative pictures, he would endeavour to provide
a higher kind of education, in which all the secrets of
science and philosophy should be revealed. Further-
more, the men thus educated were to take the place of
kings or governors of the State, and to find in their
contemplation of the intelligible universe the exemplar,
after which, so far as possible, they should mould
the life of the community over which they ruled.
THE IDEA OF GOOD 153
For, in Plato’s view, he who has grasped the supreme
principle of truth, which he calls the Idea of Good,
is by it carried beyond all the contradictions of
ordinary experience, and has become able to regard
the confused and shadowy world of appearance from
a higher point of view. He has become possessed
of a divine pattern, by means of which he can
bring order into the transitory life of men in this
world.
Plato, then, makes a sharp division between an
earlier stage of religious development of his citizens,
in which they are to be kept out of sight of moral
and religious difficulties, and taught simply that all
things are ordered for the best by perfectly good
gods, and a later stage of it, in which they are to
face all the problems of existence, and to endea-
vour to solve them by the aid of philosophical
reflexion. At the same time, he is deeply conscious
of the difficulties of the transition from the first to
the second of these stages ; or, in other words, of the
dangers of that period of doubt and criticism with
which philosophical enquiry must begin. In the
seventh book of the Republic, he illustrates these
dangers by the image of a youth who is brought up
to reverence certain persons as his parents, and who
is protected from temptation by his belief in their
rightful authority over him, but who suddenly learns
that they have no such natural claim to his obedience,
154 THE STATE AND
and is tempted in consequence to disregard all
the commands they have laid upon him. In like
manner, as Plato would indicate, the young man
who is prematurely initiated into the dialectical
methods of philosophical criticism, will learn to detect
the illusion of his first faith in those mythological
divinities whom he has been taught to regard as
the authors of the ethical rules under which he has
hitherto lived; and he will therefore be in danger of
falling into a fatal scepticism, and losing his hold
upon all ethical rules whatever. Hence Plato urges
that this initiation, even in the case of those who
are fitted for it, should be delayed till the character
has been thoroughly confirmed in the love of what
is good and the hate of what is evil; and that, in
the case of the great body of the citizens, it should
not take place at all.
How, as we have already seen, there is a great dif-
ficulty in admitting the conception of such a division
between two classes of citizens in the same State — a
division in which the higher class possesses for itself
the esoteric truth of philosophy, while the lower class
is fed with mythological fables. There is, indeed, at
all times, a certain difference between the ordinary
consciousness which is content with half-pictorial
modes of thought, and the reflective spirit of science
which cannot be satisfied with anything but exact
definition and clear logical connexion : but it is impos-
THE IDEA OF GOOD 155
sible to draw any definite line of separation between
two classes of human beings, not living in different
ages, but at the same time, and as members of the
same society. Still more impossible — if there are
grades in impossibility — would it be, in an age of
reflexion, to push men back into an earlier stage of
culture and save them from all the dangers of doubt.
In such an age, the sphere of opinion cannot be
sharply divided from that of science ; nor is it possible
by any artificial barriers such as Plato proposes, to
secure men from the disturbing power of a dialectic,
which detects the ‘noble untruths 1 of poetry. The
idea of a class of philosopher-kings who are to keep
the keys of knowledge for themselves, and act as
a kind of earthly providence to other men, sins,
like Carlyle’s conception of hero-worship, against
the solidarity of humanity. A secret doctrine of
philosophy is almost a contradiction in terms: for
philosophy cannot live, and refuse to communicate
itself to anyone who is capable of receiving its lessons.
Something like it we may find in early stages of
civilisation, as among the Egyptian priesthood, or in
a modified form in the divided society of the middle
ages. Eut such exceptions prove the rule : for in
both cases philosophy was enslaved by tradition and
smitten with barrenness. It was not the free evolu-
tion of thought which alone Plato would have thought
worthy of the name.
156 THE STATE AND
In the case o f the few who are admitted to the
higher training in dialectic, Plato thinks that philo-
sophy is able to replace the optimism of faith by
a higher optimism, which is not, like the former,
attained by a mere evasion of difficulties — by refus-
ing to admit the reality of that which is ignoble
or evil, or by taking refuge in the pure heaven of
art — but which is to look all such problematical
phenomena in the face, and to explain them in con-
sistency with the absolute reality of the good. Now,
it is manifest that philosophy can do this only in
one of two ways : either by showing that what we
call evil may itself from a higher point of view be
resolved into a means to good, or into a phase in its
development; or, at least, by showing that evil has
only a secondary and transitory existence, which is
incidental to the realisation of good in this phe-
nomenal world. I here put these two alternatives
in contrast ; for they point to two paths of idealistic
philosophy of which we shall have much to say in
the sequel, and which, therefore, it is well to have
before us from the first. I say, then, that the
difficulties and contradictions that seem to attach to
the facts of our earthly existence, and especially the
problem of evil, may be met by philosophy in two
possible ways. On the one hand, philosophy may
admit that there is some resistant element, or negative
characteristic, in the phenomenal world, by reason of
THE IDEA OF GOOD 157
which the highest good cannot be realised in that
world; but, at the same time, it may maintain that
this element becomes secondary and accidental in
our eyes, when we turn to the permanent ideal
being which gives even to the world of phenomena
all the reality to which it can lay claim. Or, on
the other hand, in the spirit of a more thorough-
going idealism, philosophy may maintain that evil
exists only in the part when we isolate it from the
whole, or only in the particular phases of existence
when we separate them from the complete process
to which they contribute. Which of these solutions
Plato adopted, we must presently consider. In the
meantime we have to note that the religio philo-
sophy to which we advance in the second part of
the Republic, centres in the Idea of Good, as a prin-
ciple of unity on which c all thinking things ’ and
'all objects of all thought’ are dependent.
In the contemplation of this idea, the philosopher
is carried beyond the State, and the morality of use
and wont which is bound up with its existence,
49
to the contemplation of the whole system of the
universe, in comparison with which the State is a
very little thing. For the philosopher, in Plato’s
ideal picture of him, is one whose thought, in the
first instance at least, is directed away from all
that is particular, finite and transitory to that which
is universal and eternal. He is a “ spectator of all
158
THE STATE AND
time and existence/’ and he cannot be chained down,
either in thought or action, to any particular finite
object or interest. He has freed himself from the
narrow ambitions and desires of his transitory life
as a mortal man, and is therefore perfectly generous
and fearless : all mean cares and grudges have
been taken out of his heart. The vision of absolute
reality reconciles him to the universe, and to all
things and beings in it, at the same time that it
lifts him above the tendency to attribute too great
importance to any of them, and above the passionate
impulses which are the consequence of such over-
estimate of the finite. “ Such ajuuKpoXoyta such a
tendency to ascribe excessive value to the little things
of time, says Plato, “ must least of all be the
characteristic of a soul that seeks to grasp the
whole compass of reality human and divine .” 1
As it is expressed in the parallel words of Spinoza,
“love towards that which is eternal alone feeds the
soul with unmingled joy,” so that no room is left
for disturbance about finite and transitory things.
There is something that looks like a contradiction
in the fact that Plato, who has hitherto been carefully
building up the system of the State as a social and
political ideal to be realised in the immediate life
of man, now seems suddenly to soar away from all
such practical considerations, and to regard all
1 Rep . , 486 A,
THE IDEA OF GOOD 159
earthly existence as “ less than nothing and
vanity.” And an ingenious, though somewhat one-
sided German writer, has even maintained that
there is an absolute opposition between the two
parts of the Republic — an opposition which, indeed,
runs through all ideal views of life, and which
cannot be in any way solved or bridged over.
“Here,” he declares, “we find a great rift in
Platonism. It was as the moralising follower of
Socrates that Plato drew the first sketch of the
ideal State, but it is as the metaphysician — w T ho looks
beyond the changing appearance to the real being
of things — that he completes it. These two ten-
dencies meet in conflict, yet neither can free itself
from the other. The reformer, who would heal the
disease of his people, must believe in the usefulness
of his own art; but the speculative thinker must
contemn the fleeting forms of life in view of the
substantial reality that underlies them. This rift
in Platonism is, however, the rift that rends the
life of all noble spirits. They work in the present
with their best energy, yet they know that the
present is but a fleeting shadow .” 1
1 Krohn {Der Platonische Staat, p. 103), quoted in edition of the
Republic by Jowett and Campbell, Vol. II. p. 9. Compare the
remarkable passage in the Laws (803 b), etrn oi? toLvvv to. twv avQp&irwv
Trp&yfiara peyakps pkv cnrovo?jS ovk a, a vayKaUv ye pr\v cnravd&friv.
In the context it is said that “man was made to be the puppet or
plaything of the gods, and that, truly considered, is the best of
160 THE STATE AND
Krohn here seems to suppose that the last word
of Plato, and indeed of philosophy, is that there is
an absolute division in our spiritual life, and that
morals and metaphysics are essentially contradictory.
But there is, surely, no essential contradiction in reject-
ing the claim of the particular objects and interests of
our ordinary experience to be real in themselves and,
as it were, in their own right, and yet asserting their
relative reality, when they are regarded as the
manifestation of the one principle which is absolutely
real. Nor is there any inconsistency in condemning
the actual state of the world as at discord with itself
and unstable, in so far as it suggests an idea of
which it falls short, and, at the same time, thinking
of it as a step in the realisation of that idea. It
is only in so far as Plato holds, not merely that
there is “ something in the world amiss ” which “ will
be unriddled by and bye,” but that there is something
in it essentially unideal and irrational, that we can
find in his philosophy such an ultimate contradiction
as Krohn alleges. But with this point we are not
yet prepared to deal.
him.” Bruns {Plato's Gesetze ) draws attention to the contrast of
this with many other passages where the acquisition of virtue is
spoken of as the most earnest work of life {e.g. 770 d). He argues
on this and other grounds that the whole passage (803 a-804 b) is
due to Philippus, the editor of the Laws . It is possible that there is
a shade of pessimism in the passage which is not Platonic, hub the
general alternation of the two points of view is already found in the
Republic*
THE IDEA OF GOOD 161
Meanwhile let us consider what it is that Plato
finds in his Idea of Good. There are three ways
in which he endeavours to answer this question.
In the first place, as is indicated by the very name
of the Good, it is the chief and final satisfaction for
which our souls are always looking, which they
anticipate from the first and for the sake of which
they desire everything else ; yet it is the last thing
they come clearly to understand. From this point of
view the j Republic exhibits to us a series of stages in
the process of defining it. In the first book, it is
represented, as Socrates had represented it, as the
goal of the individual life, which each man has to
discover for himself by a consideration of his nature as
a man and of the work for which it fits him. Then,
at the next stage of Plato's argument, man is shown
to be essentially social, essentially a member of a
State, so that he can find his good, only as he dis-
covers his proper place in the social organism, i.e. the
place for which his special tendencies and capacities
fit him. But even here Plato cannot stop : for the
social organism itself has to be regarded sub specie
aeternitatis ; and, so viewed, it is found to be a
microcosm , a little world in itself, but one which can
only attain the perfection of which it is capable,
when it is moulded after the similitude of the
macrocosm. Hence it is the philosopher — who lives in
the contemplation of the universe, and apprehends the
VOL. I. L
162
THE STATE AND
principle of order that is manifested in it — and he
alone, who can give to the State its true or ideal
constitution. He alone can make all things “after
the patterns howed him in the Mount.” Thus
ethics and politics find their ultimate basis in a
theology which contemplates the world as a teleo-
logical system, and of this system the Idea of Good
is the end and principle.
The next step is taken by means of an analogy :
which is really more than an analogy, since the object
used as an image is declared to be the ‘ offspring 5 or
product of that which it is taken to illustrate. In
other words, the material world, from which the
image is drawn, is not for Plato an arbitrary
symbol of the ideal reality; it is its manifestation
or phenomenal expression ; and, therefore, the
principle of unity in the one is essentially akin to
the principle of unity in the other. Now, what is
the principle of unity in the material world ? It is,
Plato suggests, the sun; for the sun, as the source
of the heat which is essential to growth, may be re-
garded as the cause of the existence of the objects
we see ; while at the same time, as the source of
light, it reveals the forms and colours of those
objects, and enables us to see them. In like
manner, Plato bids us regard the Idea of Good as
at once the cause of existence to all things that
exist, and of knowledge to all minds that know
THE IDEA OF GOOD 163
them. It is thus £ beyond existence * and ‘ above
knowledge’ ; as it is that in which they both originate,
and by which they are united to each other as
elements in one whole. By the aid of this analogy,
therefore, Plato carries us beyond the conception of
a principle of unity in the objective world, and
suggests to us the thought that, if the Idea of Good
is the ultimate cause or reason of the universe, it
must be also the principle of unity in the con-
sciousness of man, the principle that constitutes his
intelligence and makes knowledge possible to him.
The third and last point in Plato’s exposition
of the Idea of Good is derived from its relation to
the other ideas. In the PJictedo , as we saw in the
last lecture, he had already spoken of a regressive
method that goes back from one idea to another
till it reaches a principle which is ultimate and
self-sufficient. Here he speaks of a similar method
by which the intelligence advances from the special
sciences to philosophy. Each of the special sciences
is shown to have some organising idea which gives
order, self-consistency and systematic connexion to
our view of a special sphere of reality, and thus
lifts us above the empirical co-existences and
sequences of phenomena within that sphere. But,
as the world is one world, and all special spheres
of reality are parts of one great all-inclusive sphere,
it is impossible for the intelligence to be satisfied
164 THE STATE AND
with the results of the special sciences. The
principles of these sciences are hypothetical, in the
sense that they are not ultimate but find their
basis in something deeper and more comprehensive
than themselves. The true dialectician is f one who
sees things in their unity/ who is unable to rest in
any fragmentary and incomplete view of things, but
must feel insecure till he has found one all-embracing
principle, which enables him to view the universe
as a systematic or organic whole. Having found
such a principle of principles he will be able to give
their proper place to all the investigations of the
special sciences. 1 * * * * 6 The Idea of Good, then, is the
1 In spite of all that has been said by Mr. Adam in his edition
of the Republic (Vol. II. p. 156 seq.), I am not convinced that the
doctrine attributed by Aristotle to Plato— that the objects of
mathematical science constitute a separate kind of existence which
stands midway between the ideal and the sensible— is to be found
in the Republic. It is true that the mathematical sciences are
spoken of as objects, not of voOs, but of di&voca, and that they
are regarded as constituting the first stage in the ascent of the
mind above sensible phenomena. It is true also that they are
said to stand in the same relation to the objects of pure in-
telligence, in which the objects of sense stand to them. Still,
the special characteristic by which Aristotle distinguished ra
pa GypariKd from ideas is not mentioned, and Plato has as yet
no hesitation in speaking of ideas of quantity. And he can
hardly have considered them disparate from the Idea of Good,
since he reaches that Idea by viewing them in their unity,
6 yap avvoiTTiKbs diaXeKTiKbs {Rep., 537 o). This, I think, supports
Jowett's rendering of the words: Kalrai voyjt&v '6vtwv per* apxrjs ;
“ when a first principle is added to them, they” — i.e. the sciences—
“are cognisable by vovs” as distinguished from hivoia.
THE IDEA OF GOOD 165
teleological principle of Socrates, as applied not
to the individual life but to the universe. It is
the final end of all things, not as something
external to them, but as immanent in them; it
is, therefore, beyond all the differences of the
finite, and especially it transcends the distinction
of knowing and being, the distinction between the
intelligence and the reality which is its object.
Lastly, it is the principle on which all other
principles rest, and in w T hich all science finds its
unity.
If we gather together these different aspects of
the Idea of Good, I think we can see what is
Platos true purpose and meaning, and at the same
time we can guard against the misconceptions of
many of his professed disciples. Thus, taking hold
of those expressions in which he separates the Idea
of Good from all others, and especially of his de-
claration that it is ‘ beyond being ’ and 4 above know-
ledge/ the Neo-Platonists identified the Good with a
unity which we cannot define or express, a unity
which we can only experience in an ecstasy wherein
all thought and even all consciousness is extinguished.
They did not observe that Plato reaches his con-
ception of it, not by abstraction, but by synthesis,
not by turning away from all the special prin-
ciples of knowledge, but by c thinking them
together/ that is, by finding the one principle which
166 THE STATE AND
shall determine the place and relations of all the
others. Nor did they attach sufficient weight to
the passages in which the good is spoken of as a
unity which is always presupposed, though never
distinctly reflected upon, in our ordinary conscious-
ness of the world. For Plato the Idea of Good is
so far from being unintelligible that it is that which
constitutes the intelligence.
There is, however, a real difficulty in the question
which is not sufficiently met by such general
statements. For how is it possible to characterise a
principle of unity which is beyond all the differences
of the finite, and, in particular, beyond the difference
of being and knowing? If we seek to define the
unity of the whole in terms of any of its parts, we
seem to be committing an obvious paralogism. But it
is not less illogical to define it by simply putting the
different parts together, as if the infinite were a
collection of finites. Hence we seem to be driven to
the resource of defining it not positively, but negatively,
that is, by denying of it everything that we assert of
its parts. But we are brought in this way to the
result of the Neo-Platonists, who argue that, because
the Good is f beyond being ’ and f above knowledge/
it cannot be characterised by any terms derived from
either : which means that it cannot be characterised
at all.
This difficulty is a real one, and it has often driven
THE IDEA OF GOOD 167
men into Agnosticism ; for it seems as if our
minds were forced to make a demand which yet it
is impossible for them to satisfy. On the one hand, it
is a necessity of thought to regard the world as a
self-consistent whole. We cannot conceive the possi-
bility of there being two worlds, which are not
parts of the same universe, because to do so wouM
make all our thinking incoherent. In all our intel-
lectual life we go upon the hypothesis that the universe
is one ; and that everything in it has its definite place
in relation to the whole, by ascertaining which we can
define it. We go upon this hypo thesis, indeed, for
the most part without thinking of it at all ; but it is
the essential business of philosophy to realise it, and
to carry back all subordinate principles to it as the
ultimate presupposition of the intelligence. Yet the
moment we try to define this unity, we are met with
the dilemma just mentioned, that either we must give
up the attempt to characterise the whole at all, or else
we must characterise it in terms of one or all of its
parts. All definition seems to rest upon the distinc-
tion of one object from another within the whole, and
therefore the whole itself and its principle of unity
seem to be beyond definition. Or if we define it in
terms of one of its parts, we carry up into the whole
the limitations of that part. Thus to say that the
ultimate reality is matter as opposed to mind, or mind
as opposed to matter, seems to involve a denial of the
168
THE STATE AND
real existence of the alternative we reject, or to reduce
it to an illusion. Is not the Idealist forced to de-
clare, as Berkeley declared, that matter is a mere idea
or subjective existence, and the Materialist to maintain
that mind is really a quality or phase of matter,
which by some illusion we treat as independent ? Or,
on the other hand, if we say that the Absolute is a
tertium quid, which is neither mind nor matter, though
it is the source of both, how are we to define this
tertium quid, or avoid reducing it to the Unknowable
of Mr. Spencer ?
The key to this problem is to observe that the
distinction of mind and matter, or of knowing and
being, like all other distinctions we make, is a
distinction within the intelligible world, a distinction
in consciousness, which presupposes a unity beyond
the diff erence. It is not, therefore, a distinction
between two terms which stand on the same level,
as if we had knowledge on the one side and reality on
the other — each given altogether independently of the
other — and had then to seek for something to mediate
between them. To suppose such a dualism would be to
assert the complete separation of two things, which are
never presented in our experience except in relation to
each other. It would be to deny thought its essential
character as consciousness of an object, or reality its
essential character as the object of thought. For we
do not — as might seem from some psychological
THE IDEA OF GOOD 169
theories — first know ourselves, and then infer the
existence of objects from the nature of certain of our
thoughts; but it is only in distinguishing ourselves
from, and relating ourselves to an objective world
that we know the self within us at all. On the other
hand, it is equally true — and it w T as a large part of the
work of Kant to prove it — that objective reality is in
essential relation to the conscious subject, and that it
is impossible ultimately to think away this relation
from it. Furthermore, so intimately associated in our
experience are object and subject, that it might easily
be shown that we cannot enlarge our inner life or
deepen our self-consciousness, except by widening our
experience and knowledge of the objective world;
and that we cannot widen our experience of the
world, except by a process that draws out the
capacities and enriches the inner life of the self.
Hence to ask how we get from the subject to the
object, or from the object to the subject, or from
their difference to their unity, is to put the question
in such a way that it cannot be answered; for, if
we could suppose them to be primarily unrelated,
it would be impossible to pass from the one to the
other, or, even if we had both, to discover their
unity.
The problem, however, takes a very different aspect
when we realise that in all our conscious life the unity
of both terms is the presupposition of their difference
170
THE STATE AND
and that it is simply due to the self-ignorance of the
ordinary consciousness — to its want of reflexion upon
its own nature and conditions — that it fails to
recognise the fact. Thus, in our natural dualism, we
begin by taking the two terms, the mind and its
object, as independent of each other. Then, as
reflexion advances, we seek for some tertium quid
which shall furnish a link of connexion between them.
Lastly, as we become aware of the impossibility of
finding any such tertium quid , we are apt to fall
back on the paradox of Mysticism — that we know
there is a unity of which we know nothing, and to
which we approach only as we empty our minds of all
positive contents. The truth is that, as the unity of
the intelligence and the intelligible world is the first
presupposition of all experience, it is not to be reached
by abstraction, but rather by correcting the abstraction
of our ordinary consciousness ; by realising that unity
which is always with us — underlying all our thought,
though not directly apprehended by it — and only
needing to be brought to light by reflexion. As
Plato says of the definition of justice, we have been
seeking for it far away while it was lying close at our
feet. But we need not to search in the heights above
or in the depths beneath for "that which is in our
mouth and in our heart.’ If it is f beyond reality , 5 it is
because it is the substance of which all reality is the
manifestation ; if it is ‘ above knowledge/ it is only
THE IDEA OF GOOD 171
in the sense that we must go beyond experience to
realise what experience is.
The question has often been asked, whether
the idea of Good is equivalent to the idea of God.
I think we must answer that the unity of being
and knowing, if we take it positively, cannot be
conceived except as an absolute self-consciousness, a
creative mind, whose only object is a universe which
is the manifestation of itself. This aspect of the idea
is not emphasised in the Republic , but it is obviously
implied in it. Plato seems, in the first instance, to
have regarded his ‘ ideas ’ mainly as objective realities
— the word ‘ idea ’ itself at first suggesting a form or
figure which we see, and then being transferred to
the essence of the object as grasped by a thought
which goes beyond its appearances. But here in the
Republic Plato formulates a truth — which, no doubt,
was very near him from the first, though not
distinctly formulated — that the object is not com-
plete apart from the thought which grasps it ;
and the term c idea * is henceforth used by Mm
to express this unity. Plato does not, like most
moderns, begin with the subjective consciousness,
and ask for an object corresponding to it : he begins
with the object and goes on to realise that it is
essentially an c object thought/ an intelligible object.
But when this point is reached the impersonal ‘ idea '
begins to approximate to a consciousness or mind, and
172 THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD
we pass beyond idealism to spiritualism. Thus ‘ the
Idea of Good’ is only a step removed from the idea of
a supreme intelligence, the vovs 6elo$ of which Plato
speaks in the Philebus . 1 We may therefore fairly say
that, with the sixth hook of the Republic, Plato has
extended to the universe the Socratic conception of
moral life, and has thereby become the founder of
speculative theology.
1 Phil . , 22 c, 28 d.
LECTURE SEVENTH.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY
OF IDEAS.
In the Republic Plato puts the coping-stone upon his
ideal theory by asserting not merely the esistence of a
number of independent ideas, but the systematic unity
of all ideas under one supreme principle, a principle at
once of all reality and of all thought. But, with this
conception of the ultimate unity of all things with each
other and with the mind, Plato’s philosophy seems to
enter upon a second stage of development, which
carries him still farther away from the abstract
idealism commonly attributed to him. Por hitherto
he has looked upon the idea mainly as a unifying
principle — a principle w’hich we need not, indeed, take
as a mere abstraction, but which is so far abstract as
it leaves out many of the aspects of the manifold and
changing phenomena, and has no differences or deter-
minations but such as flow from its own nature. There
is, however, a great danger of misunderstanding when
174 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
such almost exclusive emphasis is laid upon the unity
of the idea, as if it had no distinction of elements
within itself at all ; and this misunderstanding might
go still farther in view of what Plato says as to the
idea of good being ‘beyond being’ and ‘beyond know-
ledge/ if this were taken as excluding its immanence
in both.
It is, therefore, noticeable that in the dialogues
which follow the Republic Plato begins to change his
point of view, and to speak of it as the business
of philosophy, not only to rise from difference to
unity, but also to trace the way downwards from
unity to difference and multiplicity. Already in
the Republic , where the dialectician is primarily
characterised as one who ‘thinks things together/
it is indicated that, after he has reached the highest
idea, he must seek to develop all the other ideas
from it. But in the Rhctedrus the two processes of
synthesis and analysis, ovvaycoyy and Swlpeon?, are
distinctly put on a level ; and only he who is able
rightly to perform them both is thought worthy of the
name of a dialectician. He must be able, Plato declares,
“ to take a comprehensive view of the multitude of
scattered particulars and to bring them under one
form or idea, for the purpose of defining the nature of
the special subject which he wishes to discover.” But
he must also “ be able to divide into species, carefully
attending to the natural joints by which the parts are
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 175
severed and connected, and not breaking any part, like
a bad carver” “ Of these processes,” says the Platonic
Socrates, “I have always been a lover, seeking by their
means to make myself able to speak and to think.
And if I can find anyone who is thus able to see up
to the one and down to the many, I am ready to
follow in his footsteps as if he were a God.” 1
Plato illustrates this view by a criticism of the
teaching of rhetoric by some of the leading orators
of the day, as resting upon a number of empirical
rules about the use of words, about figures of speech,
or about the commonplaces of argument, and not
based upon any comprehensive view of the nature
and object of oratory, and of the different elements
and conditions that go to the making of an effective
speech. In discussing the nature of anything, we
must, he declares, first enquire whether it is simple
or multiform ; and, if it is simple, we must ask what
capacity it has of acting upon other things and being
acted on by them ; while, if it has more forms than
one, we must determine how many they are, and what
capacity of acting or being acted on belongs to each
of them. Without such a preliminary analysis, our
procedure will be like the groping of a blind man.
Now, as rhetoric has to act on the souls of men, we
must begin in this case by asking what is the nature
of the soul, and whether it is simple or multiform like
2 Phaedrus, 266
176 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
the body. Then we must enquire how it, or any part
of it, acts or is acted on, and by what agencies. And,
lastly, we must classify the different kinds of argument,
as well as the different kinds of soul and the affections
of which they are susceptible; and we must fit the
several arguments to the several mental constitutions,
and show how such and such souls are necessarily
wrought upon by such and such discourses. If we
proceed on this method, our rhetorical art will be not
a collection of unconnected empirical rules, but a real
scientific system; and any speech we construct in
accordance with its prescriptions will be not an
aggregate of unconnected arguments and exhortations,
but an organised whole. In Plato’s own words :
“ This, I think, you will admit, that every speech
ought to be composed like a living being, which has a
complete body of its own, and is neither without head
nor without feet ; in other words, it ought to have a
beginning, middle, and end, all in harmony with each
other and with the whole.” 1
This conception of the equal importance of distinc-
tion and relation, of analysis and synthesis, do m i n ates
all the later dialogues. Science is henceforth presented
to us as an organised system of parts, which are clearly
distinguished from each other, yet essentially bound
together by the one idea or principle which is realised
in them. In Plato’s exposition of this view 3 however?
1 Phaedrus , 264 c.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 177
we find something of the same ambiguity which lay in
his first account of the ideal theory. And, as there it
was sometimes doubtful whether the idea was to be
regarded as merely the abstraction of some common
element in the particulars, or as a principle which
explained their differences: so here, it is not quite
clear whether Plato is merely referring to the division
of a genus into subordinate species according to some
arbitrarily chosen principium divisionis , or whether he
means that the higher idea is to be taken as itself
supplying the principle of its own division, and the
subordinate ideas as having a necessary intercon-
nexion, such that each implies and is implied in all the
others. As, therefore, in the former case, we had to
ask whether the idea is an abstract or a concrete
universal, a common element or a principle which
explains a certain compass of differences ; so in the
latter case, we have to ask whether the relations of the
parts that fall under the idea is that of co-ordinate
species which do not stand in any essential relation
to each other, or whether it is that of parts which
cannot he conceived except as belonging to one whole.
Is Plato, after all, only aiming at a mere classification
of different existences from an arbitrarily chosen point
of view, or is he seeking to comprehend the intelligible
world, and every distinct part of it, as a system of
members which are in organic unity with each
other ?
VOL. i. m .
178 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
It is not easy to solve this problem; indeed, it
cannot be solved by a simple c yes ’ or ‘ no/ For, in
the first place, before we deal with it at all, we have
to separate two questions which Plato does not always
clearly distinguish — the question as to the Kocrpog
yotjrog, the system of ideas when viewed in themselves,
and the question as to the objects of the phenomenal
world, wdiich are said to participate in these ideas.
In regard to the latter, it is abundantly evident that,
according to Plato, particular phenomenal existences
are subsumed under ideas without being completely
determined by them. Indeed, it is the primary
characteristic of the world of sense and opinion that
the f many ’ in it is not completely determined by the
‘ one 5 ; or, in other wnrds, that its differences and
its changes are not the pure manifestation of ideal
principles, but in many ways fall short of them. Of
this relation of the phenomenal to the ideal world, I
shall have to speak in a later lecture ; for the present
we have to consider the pure relation of ideas as
elements in the intelligible world.
But, even from this point of view, the intention of
Plato is not without some ambiguity, especially when
we consider the way in which he employs the method
of division in the Sophist and the Politicus . For in
these dialogues he seeks to define an object simply
by taking a large genus in which it is included, and
dividing it into two species by any principle of
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
179
division that suggests itself ; then, subsuming the
object under one of the species, he proceeds again
to divide that species by another arbitrary prin-
cipiurn divisionis; and so on till he reaches an infima
species which cannot be further divided. We can,
however, hardly suppose that Plato means us to
take this method quite seriously: indeed, the six
examples of division by which the Eleatic stranger
reaches the definition of the Sophist seem rather
intended to exhibit the defects of such an arbitrary
process, and to illustrate the fallacy which Aristotle
points out when he says that division is a ‘weak
inference/ And we have to observe that in the latter
part of the dialogue Plato directs all his efforts to
illustrate a view of ideas and their relations, which
is entirely opposed to this. Indeed, the aim of the
whole remarkable group of dialogues which includes
the Theaetetus, the Sophist and the Parmenides,
seems to be just this — to develop the doctrine that
universals are not abstractions but concrete principles
of unity in difference ; and that they have a com-
munity with each other, which we can only express
by saying that each contains or involves all the
others.
This view of ideas seems to have arisen in Plato's
mind in connexion with a careful study of the con-
flicting views of the earlier Greek philosophers which,
till this period, had not received much attention from
180 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
him. 1 The controversy between the two great schools,
that of the Eleatics who insisted upon the unity and
permanence of objects, and that of the Heracliteans who
insisted exclusively upon their multiplicity and change-
fulness — suggested to Plato the idea that neither of
them could be regarded as adequate, and that the
truth must lie in some tertium quid , which should at
once transcend and combine them both. Hence he
declares in the Theaetetus that it is above all necessary
for us to examine carefully the two opposite theories
of those who set everything in flux and of those who
would make all reality immovable. And then he
adds that “if we find that neither of these schools
has anything reasonable to say, we shall be absurd
enough to think that we, poor creatures, are able to
suggest something to the purpose, while we reject
the views of ancient and famous men.” 2 If, therefore,
the ideal theory were to vindicate its claims, it must
show itself able to unite the 'one' and the 'many/ and
to prove that they are not absolutely opposed but
rather require each other. Accordingly in these dia-
1 Aristotle (Metaph., I. 6) says that the development of the ideal
theory was due to a combination of the Socratic view of nniversals
with a conception of sensation and its objects due to the philosophy
of Heraclitus. But we do not find this connexion of Sensationalism
with the Heraclitean philosophy referred to except in the Theaetetus ,
and the earlier development of the ideal theory in the Mena , Gorgias,
Symposium , Phaedo i and Republic does not appear to be connected
with any direct Heraclitean influence.
2 Theaetetus , 181 b.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
181
logues Plato seeks to prove, on the one hand, that the
views of these two schools are one-sided and self-
contradictory, and, on the other hand, that the Ideal
theory is able to take up into itself the elements of
truth that are in both. And it is important to
notice that he directs his criticism both against the
objective aspect of these philosophies, as theories of
being, and against their subjective aspect, as theories
of knowing; and that from this point of view he
identifies the Heraclitean philosophy with Sensation-
alism, and the Eleatic philosophy with an abstract
Idealism which might find some support in his own
earlier statement of the ideal theory.
Thus, in the Theaeieius Plato deals at once with the
Protagorean doctrine that finds the measure of all
things in the sensation of the individual, and with
the doctrine of Heraclitus that all things are in
flux ; and he attempts to show that, both severally and
together, they lead to the result that nothing exists
or can be known. For if the Heraclitean view be
true, and everything is in continual process, ever
becoming other than itself, no determination either
of quality or quantity can remain even for a moment,
and nothing can be said even to be. If there be
nothing permanent, there is no reality in anything.
And this, again, implies that no knowledge Is pos-
sible; for, ex hyjpothesi, there is nothing left to char-
acterise the object as one thing rather than its
182 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
opposite j* and that which is always changing in
every aspect of it, can not be known even as chaneino-
o o*
Again, looking at the question from the side of the
subject “ pure Sensationalism is speechless”; for we
can neither distinguish one sensation from, nor
identify it with another, unless our thought goes
beyond the sensation itself. “There is, therefore,
no knowledge in the impressions of sense, but only
in the discourse of reason in regard to them.” 1
In the Sophist, again, the same results are shown
to follow from the opposite doctrine, that is, from
the abstract Eleatic assertion of the absolute unity
and permanence of being; for, if no difference be
admitted in the aspects of the One, we cannot say
anything about it. Even to affirm that ‘the One
is,’ implies some distinction between being and
unity. Every predication, in short, if it means
anything, involves a relative difference between the
subject and the predicate, and bare identity means
nothing at all. Similar reasons make it impossible
to give any meaning to a permanence which is with-
out change, movement or activity. Neither absolute
motion without rest nor absolute rest without motion
can be conceived, but only the union of the two—
that which combines motion and rest, or which
1 Theaet., 186 D. it fikv &pa tois iradruuunv oik hi brurriuai, ev tie r£
irepi <k«W mWoyta fiQ. Of course, syllogism has not yet its technical
sense.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
183
rests in one point of view and moves in another . 1
But if in this way pure unity and permanence,
and pure diversity and change he proved to be
each of them unintelligible, if they can neither be
nor be known, what is the necessary inference ? It
is obviously that the only thing that can either be,
or be known, is the one-in- the-many, the permanent-
in-change. The Eleatie and the Heraclitean theories
equally failed, because they attempted to divorce
two elements which are inseparably united.
This result Plato immediately applies to the ideal
theory. By its aid he sets aside the ordinary con-
ception of ideas as self-referent abstractions, which
are without any difference in themselves and without
any relation to each other — a conception which
had derived some support from the language of
Plato himself in his earlier dialogues. Even in
the Republic, he had spoken as if any community
or connexion between different ideas would be a
source of confusion as to their real nature . 2 But
now he points out that, if ideas are to be conceived
as principles of being and of knowledge, they can-
not be taken as abstract identities without differ-
ence, or as unmoved types unrelated to each other
and to the mind. As principia cssendi, they must
be unities of differences, and each of them must
have a definite place in the system of the whole,
'Sophist, *249, 3. 2 Rep.. 47 G a.
184 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
differentiated from the others and yet related to
them ; and as principia cognoscendi , they must have
community or relationship with the mind, and they
must be conceived as forms of its activity as
well as of the activity of the object.
In the Parmenides , this view is confirmed by an
examination of the ideal theory with special refer-
ence to the problem of the one and the many.
Plato begins the discussion by casting contempt
on the easy dialectical tricks of the sophists and
rhetoricians, who proved that the one is also many,
only by pointing out that the same individual in
spite of his identity has many parts or attributes.
But the true question of the one and the many
relates to the difference and unity of these ideas in
themselves, and not as they may be accidentally
combined in one subject. “If, then, any one should
attempt to show that the one and the many are
the same, taking for his illustration the case of
stones or trees and the like, we shall say that he
shows, indeed, that something is at once one and
many, but not that the one itself is many, or the
many one. Thus he does not tell us anything
worthy of wonder, but only what anyone can see for
himself. But if, as I have just said, he were first
to divide such pairs of ideas and set each idea by
itself — say, the ideas of similarity and dissimilarity,
of the one and the many, of rest and motion — and
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 185
should then show that these opposites are capable
ol being combined and separated, I should be
greatly surprised/' 1 Parmenides, however, proceeds
to show that this result at which Socrates would
wonder so much, can be actually realised : firstly, by a
criticism of the theory of ideas, viewed as abstract
universals ; and secondly, by following out the hypo-
theses of the existence and of the non-existence of
both of the one and of the many, in all the
various senses in which these hypotheses can be
taken.
In the first part of this investigation Plato
shows the difficulties of the ideal theory, so long as
ideas are taken as the common elements in various
particulars, and yet at the same time as independent
substances. For then, he asks, what can be meant
by saying that many things participate in the same
ideas? If the idea be an independent substance,
like a sail drawn over many objects, 2 it is impossible
that it should be wholly in each of the things that
participate in it: yet it would be absurd to suppose
that it was divided among them ; for, in that case, it
would cease to be one idea, and would thus lose all
its meaning. Again, if the Idea corresponds merely
1 Parmenides , 129 x>. It might be suggested that by putting this
into the mouth of Socrates, Plato was acknowledging that there was
a time when it applied to himself.
2 Farm . , 131 B.
186 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
to the common element in many particular subjects
which in other respects are different from each other,
it will not be essentially related to these subjects,
and cannot explain their existence. It will only be
accidentally present in them along with their other
qualities; or if it be essentially bound up with
them, it must be through some third idea. 1 But,
again, if that third idea be only a common element in
the first idea and the particular subjects brought under
it, it will only be accidentally related to both, and
a fresh idea will be required to establish connexion
between them; and so on ad infinitum. Nor will
it alter the case if we suppose that the idea is an
abstract typje, and the subjects are merely like it:
for if likeness requires an idea to explain it, we
again fall back into the same processus in infinitum.
It appears, then, that we can explain nothing parti-
cular by means of an abstract universal.
There is obviously no way out of these difficulties,
so long as the idea is taken simply as a common
element in a number of species and individuals, and
not as a principle which manifests itself in their
difference and binds them together into one systematic
whole. Such an organic principle alone can be
conceived as whole in all the parts brought under
3 Parm. , 132 A. This is the rpiros avdpomos argument, which is
so often mentioned, by Aristotle, though he takes no notice of the
discussion of it in the Parmenides.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
187
it, and, therefore, as needing no tertium quid to
unite it with them. Now, looking to the way in
which, both in the Thcaeletus and the Sophist,
Plato seeks to carry us beyond the abstract theories
of the earlier schools, we cannot but suppose that
his intent is to bring us to this conclusion, that
is, to make us accept the doctrine that the true
universal or idea is a concrete or organic prin-
ciple, w'hich is one with itself in all the diversity
of its manifestations ; though, as is often the case,
his dialectic is negative rather than positive, and
he leaves us to draw the inference for ourselves.
Still more important Is the application of the
same method to the relation between ideas and the
mind. If ideas be taken as objective principles,
complete in themselves apart from any relation to
our thought, Plato argues that they can be nothing
for us ; and the objects of knowledge, though
called by the same names as the ideas, will have
no relation to them. They will be completely
transcendent and removed from our consciousness;
and, if there be any consciousness which grasps
them, it will have no community or connexion
with our minds. Yet, on the other hand, if we
reject this hypothesis, and take ideas merely as our
thoughts, which, as such, exist only in our minds,
they will be reduced to subjective affections ; and It
will be impossible to explain how through them we
188 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
can know anything objective. It is, however, absurd
to regard thoughts in this way, as mere subjective
states of an individual consciousness. “Why/’ asks
Parmenides, “ must not a thought be a thought of
something ? And, if so, must it not be the thought
of one definite object ? And must not this object
be an ideal form, which remains the same in all
cases in which it is realised ? ” 1 In other words,
Plato points out that the conceptualist hypothesis
here suggested will not help us out of any of the
difficulties involved in objective idealism; and that,
indeed, it involves an ignoratio elenchi . For ideas
or universals cannot be taken as mere states of
mind referring to nothing beyond themselves. But
if not — if through universals we know anything — this
implies that in some sense they are in the objects
known through them, as well as in our minds; and,
indeed, that they are just the principles that give
definiteness and unity to these objects, and make
them capable of being known.
But if we can neither say that ideas are real
principles without relation to mind, nor yet reduce
them to states of mind, if, in other words, we can
neither treat them as purely objective nor as purely
subjective, what follows ? Obviously the only re-
maining alternative is that the distinction between
thought and reality, subjective and objective, must
1 Farm 132 c.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 189
be regarded as a relative difference — a distinction
between factors in a unity, which imply each other
and which cannot be separated. On this view
reality cannot be conceived except as the object of
thought, nor thought except as the consciousness of
reality. On the one hand, to take reality as com-
plete in itself apart from thought, or as only
accidentally related to thought, is essentially to
misconceive its nature; for every characteristic by
which objects are determined as such, can be shown
to involve their relation to a conscious subject; and
the attempt to abstract from this relation would
compel us to treat them as unknowable — as something
external to the life of the subject, and which,
therefore, the consciousness of the subject cannot
reach. Indeed, it would be impossible on this
hypothesis to explain how even the imagination of
such objective reality should ever present itself to
consciousness at all. On the other hand, it is
equally irrational to take thoughts as mere states of
the subject without reference to reality; for it is in
such objective reference that all their meaning lies.
Indeed, apart from such reference, we conld not
apprehend them even as states of the subject.
We must, then, regard an idea , in the Platonic
sense, as a principle which transcends the distinction
of subject and object, of thought and reality, and
which manifests itself in both. We are not,
190 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
indeed, required to deny that there is an accidental,
or merely subjective aspect of knowledge — as realised
in a finite individual and under the special conditions
of an individual life ; but we can never take the con-
sciousness of an object as a mere state or quality of the
individual subject, as determined by such conditions.
We must regard such consciousness, however partial
and inadequate it be, as the manifestation in an
individual form of the one principle which is the
source of all being and all thought. While, therefore,
we uphold the relative distinction of thought and
reality, we must be careful not to elevate it into
an absolute difference ; for this would leave us with,
on the one side, an idea which is merely a state
of the subject, and, on the other side, a reality
which is unknowable. We must repel the Berkeleian
tendency to dissolve objects into ‘ mere ideas ’ : but
at the same time we must remember that as objects
they are relative to the subject ; for reality as
intelligible implies the intelligence, and the intel-
ligence, on its part, is nothing except as conscious of
reality. We cannot understand either the process
of being or the process of thought, unless we realise
that they are only different aspects or stages of the
same process ; and that, in their utmost divergence,
they are held within the unity of one principle or,
as Plato expresses it, of one idea .
But w r hen we adopt this view of ideas, we are led
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 191
to a further result, which also is recognised by Plato.
As we have seen, Plato requires us to conceive the
idea as the unity of the opposite principles of the
Eleatics and the Heraeliteans, and, therefore, as com-
bining in itself unity and difference, permanence
and change. This, however, means that an idea must
be conceived as a self-determining or active principle ;
since only that which is self-determined can be said
to transcend these oppositions, to maintain its unity in
difference and its permanence in change. It alone
can combine movement with rest, because its activity
has its source and end in itself. But where are
we to find such a self-determined principle ? It is
obviously a conception which can find its realisa-
tion, or at least its adequate realisation, only in
a mind. Hence we do not wonder to find Plato
declaring that “ Being in the full sense of the
word (to iravreXws ov ) cannot be conceived without
motion and life, without soul and mind .” 1 In other
words, ideas, merely as such, are deposed from the
highest place as principles of thought and reality
and the place is taken by souls or minds. Accord-
ingly, in the Phcudrus, in a passage to which we
shall have to return, the soul is spoken of as the
one principle which is immortal and unchangeable,
because it alone is self-moved or self-determined
and, therefore, the cause of all determination or
1 Sophist, 24 S’ e.
192 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
change in other things. 1 And it is obviously
impossible to admit such a conception of soul or
mind without depriving ideas, as such, of the posi-
tion which they have hitherto occupied.
But with this a new difficulty arises : for, if
“reality in the full sense of the word” he only
found in souls or minds, what are we to make
of other objects? Are we to say that they are un-
real appearances? Then we shall have escaped the
paradox of subjective idealism — that the only objects
we know are our ideas as states of our subjectivity —
only to fall into what we may call the paradox of
objective idealism, that the only objects which we
can recognise as such are minds. This diffi culty
does not escape Plato ; and accordingly we find him
arguing in the Parmenides that, if things participate
in ideas, and ideas are thoughts, we are reduced to the
dilemma, either that ‘all things think,’ that is, that
all things are minds : or, that “ they are thoughts
which exist without being in any mind that thinks
them.” 2 But, if we reject the second alternative as
absurd, we seem to be driven to the conclusion that
nothing has real existence except minds and their
3 Phaedrus , 245 c. It is to be noted that the dialogue in which
Flato first speaks of the soul as self-moving and immortal is also the
dialogue in which he first asserts that dialectic is a process both of
analysis and synthesis, and that its object is to attain to a systematic
view of things.
2 Parm . , 132 C. po^/xara 6vra dvdqra expat.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 193
states, and that all other existence is an illnsorv
appearance. Can this conclusion be taken as in any
sense reasonable ? And, if so, what is Plato’s attitude
towards it ?
Xqw, there is a sense in which every idealist must
admit that the only object of mind is mind. Every-
one who holds that the real is relative to mind, and,
therefore, that the difference between mind and its
object cannot be an absolute difference, must acknow-
ledge that whatever is real, (and just so far as it is
real,) has the nature of mind manifested in it.
Reality cannot be alien to the subject that knows
it, nor can the intelligence comprehend any object
except as it finds itself in it. In other words,
objects can be recognised as real, only if, and so
far as, they have that unity in difference, that per-
manence in change, that intelligible individuality,
which are the essential characteristics of mind. 1 At
least we can regard an object as an independent
and substantial existence only in so far as it pos-
sesses such characteristics.
It is not, however, necessary to infer from this
that every object, which is in any sense real, ‘ thinks,’
or is a conscious subject ; for we do not need to
take reality as a simple predicate, which must be
attached to everything in exactly the same sense.
We may, and, indeed, we must admit that there are
1 Hep. 477 A. to iravreXQ s ov Travrehws yviaarov,
VOL. I. N
194 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
what Mr. Bradley calls differences of degree, or what
might perhaps even be regarded as differences of
kind, in reality. In its highest sense the term c real J
can be predicated only of a res completa, of that
which is complete in itself, determined by itself,
and, therefore, capable of being explained entirely
from itself. But this does not involve the denial of
reality even to the most transient of phenomena, if it
be but as a phase of something more substantial
than itself. There is a certain gradation in the
being of things, according to the measure of their
independence. From this point of view, every
systematic whole must stand higher in the order of
reality than an aggregate of unconnected, or exter-
nally connected parts; and a living being in its
organic individuality would be regarded as more real
than any inorganic thing. In the sphere of the
organic, again, we may find many grades of being,
from the simplest vegetable cell up to the highest
and most complex of animals. But while all such
beings are conceived as in a sense substantial, in so
far as their existence is referred to a centre in
themselves, it is only in man that we find that
permanent self-identity, that unity with himself in all
difference and change, which is needed fully to satisfy
our conception of substantial reality. He only can
be properly said to have a self, since he only is
fully conscious of it. And it is only as self-conscious
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
195
that he is able to refer all things to himself and so to
generate a new world for himself; or, if we prefer
to put it so, to reconstitute the common world of
all from a fresh individual centre. Even here, how-
ever, we cannot stop ; for no finite spirit is complete
in itself. As finite, he is part of a greater whole,
the member of a society which itself is but one phase
of humanity, conditioned by all the other phases of
it, and, indeed, by all the other elements that enter
into the constitution of the universe. We can,
therefore, find that which is absolutely real or sub-
stantial only in a creative mind, from whom all
things and beings must be conceived as deriving
whatever reality or substantiality they possess.
Now, if we adopt this point of view, it is possible
to regard all objective reality as kindred with the
intelligence, without going on to assert that nothing
exists except minds and their states. In other words,
it is possible to maintain that every intelligible object
is a partial form or expression of the same principle
which is fully expressed in the intelligence, without
denying the relative reality either of the inorganic or
the organic world, and without, on the other hand,
treating every mind as an absolutely self-determined
being.
We cannot, however, without much qualifica-
tion, attribute any such conception to Plato. Plato,
indeed, speaks of grades of being, but only in
196 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
connexion with the theory of metempsychosis: that
is, he speaks only of the grades of elevation or
degradation through which the individual soul may
pass. All organised beings, or rather we should
say all animals — for nothing is said of plants — are
conceived by Plato as having in them a principle
of self-determination to which he gives the name of
a soul; and all souls are treated as fundamentally
identical in nature. But this nature is shown in
its purity only in the Divine Being; or, if in men,
only in those men in whom the intelligence reaches its
highest development ; and, pre-eminently, in the philo-
sopher who has grasped the central idea of good, and,
therefore, beholds all things sub specie aeternitatis.
And while the soul thus can rise to the highest, it
can also sink to the lowest, becoming more and more
immersed in the body, till the life of intelligence is
lost in the obscure animal motions of sensation and
appetite. So far, therefore, all real or substantial
objects are conceived by Plato as souls or minds, in a
more or less elevated or degraded condition. The
doctrine of metempsychosis, in fact, enables him to
hold that, in the strict sense of the word, reality is
confined to souls or minds, without thereby denying
that it belongs to every being that has life, or at least
animal life, in it. On the other hand, when we
descend further in the scale of being, this mode of
explanation fails him, and Plato, it would seem, must
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
197
be driven either to regard all inorganic objects as mere
appearances, or else to Imagine that they are some-
how living and organic. And the latter alternative he
would be obliged to reject; for, as the body is con-
ceived as obscuring and thwarting the life of the
soul, it cannot be referred to the same principle with
that life; and its existence, even as an appearance,
becomes a difficult problem. We are therefore
compelled to recognise that at this point Plato's
idealism passes into dualism; and it becomes neces-
sary for us to enquire Into the exact form which his
dualism finally took — a question which must be
answered mainly from the Philebus and the Timaeus.
Before, however, we can deal with this subject, we
have to consider more fully Plato's doctrine of the
soul, and, particularly, his treatment of the question of
immortality.
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE IMMORTALITY 0 F THE SOUL AND THE
IDEA OF GOD.
In the last lecture I endeavoured to show how Plato
was led by a consideration of the opposing theories of
the Eleatic and Heraclitean schools, to develop and
correct his own theory of ideas. In his earlier
account of that theory he had dwelt, with somewhat
one-sided emphasis, on the contrast between the
relative and shifting character of phenomena and
the absolute unity and permanence of the ideal objects
of knowledge. He had sometimes even spoken as
if each of these objects was an 4 independent and
unchangeable unity, which was to be apprehended by
itself, apart from all relation to the others. It is
probable, however, that such statements were intended
by Plato only to bring out clearly the difference
between knowledge and opinion; and their inadequacy
was partly corrected by the way in which all the ideas
were referred back to the one central Idea of Good.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 199
Still the difficulty was not removed till, by the conflict
of the earlier schools, Plato was led to realise the
equal importance of analysis and synthesis, and to
define the idea as the unity of identity and difference,
of rest and motion. When this step was taken, the
vague consciousness of the unity of all ideas with each
other through the Idea of Good, which had been
expressed in the Republic, at once developed into
the conception of a community or connexion of ideas,
as distinct yet organically related elements of one
intelligible whole.
At the same time, another process is going on in the
mind of Plato. His early idealism had been essen-
tially objective. The idea was primarily that which is
absolutely real in the objective world as contrasted
with the appearances of sense. It was the permanent
essence of the thing which the name designated; in
Plato's own words, it was 4 the good itself/ c the
beautiful itself/ £ the equal itself ’ ; and the fact that
it was recognised as such by the mind was secondary
and derivative. But already in the Republic more
attention is drawn to the subjective aspect of the
intelligible reality, and the Idea of Good is regarded
as at once and co-ordinately the principle of know-
ing and the principle of being. And in the Phaedrus
and the Sophist this change is carried still farther,
and soul or mind is treated as itself the principle of
all thought and reality.
200 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Now, these stages in the development of Plato’s
thought are clearly reflected in his argument for the
immortality of the soul, an argument which does not
remain stationary, but is extended, modified, and
developed through a succession of dialogues. In its
earliest and most imperfect form, it is an attempt to
prove the immortality of the soul through the special
nature of its idea ; but this gradually passes into an
endeavour to show that the soul is immortal in its
own right. Thus souls or minds come to be regarded,
not as beings whose substantial reality has to be
proved by anything else, but as beings which contain
in themselves the principle of all reality, and therefore
of all proof. Finally, there is a still farther regress, by
which all individual minds are referred back to one
supreme intelligence, who is the 'first mover 7 of all
things, and who communicates life and intelligence to
all other minds or souls. It is, therefore, essential to
a comprehension of Plato’s idealism, or rather, as we
may call it, his spiritualism, that we should carefully
follow out the different phases of this argument.
In the beginning of the Phaedo the immortality of
the soul is concervecf as involving, and involved in, its
pre-existence ; and the proof of both is derived from
the somewhat mythical conception of knowledge as
reminiscence, a conception of which I have already
spoken in an earlier lecture. As the knowledge of
universals is drawn out of the soul, and not simply
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
201
put into it by direct experience or by teaching, it is
attributed to the memory of a former state of exist-
ence, a memory which has become dulled and obscured
by the descent of the spirit into the world of sense.
This memory may be revived by reflexion and
dialectic, though it cannot be completely restored till
death liberates the soul from the body and its
affections. The soul, therefore, is to be conceived as
remaining unchanged in its essential nature through
all the processes of birth and death; as being many
times born into the sensible world and departing from
it again, but ever maintaining the continuity of its life,
and carrying with it, in a more or less explicit form,
all the knowledge it ever possessed.
This suggestive poetic conception has been used
by a modern poet for the same purpose. In his
great “ Ode on Intimations of I mm ortality from
Recollections of early Childhood,” Wordsworth, lik e
Plato, connects the idea of immortality with that of
pre-existence, and finds the proof of both in those
£ shadowy recollections * of something better, which
haunt us from our earliest years : in
“Those first affections, those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet the master-light of ail our seeing,
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of an eternal silence.”
202 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
There are, however, two great changes in the Words-
worthian reproduction of the Platonic myth. In the
first place, Wordsworth seems to say that the child
is nearest to its heavenly origin, and most clearly
remembers it, and that, as we go on in life,
“the vision dies away,
And fades into the light of common day.”
Plato, on the other hand, has no sentiment about
childhood, but holds that the soul at its first coming
into the body is crushed and overwhelmed by its
mortal nature, and loses all memory of the higher
life in which it has partaken; but that, as it grows
to maturity, reminiscences of its past glories may be
re-awakened in it. They may be re-awakened, in the
first place, in a sensuous imaginative form, by beautiful
objects which are “ a shadow of good things, but not
the perfect image of those things ” : and then again
in a more distinct and self-conscious way, they may
be recalled by philosophical reflexion, which enables
us to apprehend the truth in its own universal or
ideal nature. And from this follows the second point
of difference between Wordsworth and Plato, namely,
that for Wordsworth the highest consciousness to
which the soul can attain, is connected with certain
vague imaginative suggestions or intuitions which
cannot be defined or reduced to any distinct form:
“Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
2G8
Fallings from ns, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.”
By Plato, on the other hand, all such symbolic and
imaginative modes of consciousness are regarded as a
mere foretaste and anticipation of knowledge, — a
preparatory stage, in which the mind is satisfied
with what is at best a ‘ noble untruth ’ ; whereas
the pure truth of things, as they really are, can only
be apprehended by the reflexion of the philosopher,
who grasps the universal and defines it, and who by
it is enabled to gather all the different aspects of
reality into a systematic unity.
With this half-mythical idea of reminiscence, how-
ever, Plato immediately associates the more pregnant
conception that, in rising to the universal, the mind
is not so much going back into the past as going
deeper into itself. The intelligence that grasps
the universal must have something in itself that is
kindred thereto ; it must have something of that per-
manent and substantial reality, that simplicity and
unity with itself, which belongs to the ideal object it
apprehends. It is, therefore, estranged from itself
so long as its thought is turned only to that which is
sensible and particular ; and, in awaking to that which
is spiritual and universal, it is, as it were, coming to
itself again. Nor can it be touched by death : for
204 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
death only breaks its connexion with the world of
sense, and so delivers it from that “ muddy vesture
of decay,” which obstructs its vision of the eternal,
and prevents it from recognising its kinship there-
with. Here, as elsewhere in the Fhaedo , Plato seems
to yield to the mystic tendency to exaggerate the
opposition between the intelligible and the sensible,
and to dwell upon that aspect of universals in
which they appear as pure ideal unities freed from
all the accidents of finite existence. And his
argument is simply that the soul, in so far as it
is capable of grasping such ideas, must be, like
them, lifted above time and change. Plato, there-
fore, is not yet prepared to maintain that the
soul in its own right is immortal, still less to assert
that it is the self-determining principle which
determines all other things, the substantial being
that underlies and gives origin to all other reality.
He still treats it as a particular existence, which
must be proved to be immortal through its special
relation to the ideal and eternal.
Hor does he go much beyond this point of view
even in the curious argument which concludes the
dialogue, and which he seems to regard as its most
important result. The idea of the soul, he there
contends, presupposes the idea of life ; and it cannot
be separated from life, any more than the idea of
evenness can be separated from the number two, or
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 205
the idea of oddness from the number three. Hence,
just because the idea of life is involved in the idea
of the soul, the soul must live for ever.
We have here a close parallel to the ontological
argument for the being of God — the argument that
God necessarily exists, because existence is involved
in the conception of Him as a perfect being. And
both arguments seem open to the same objection.
To the ontological argument it is objected that we
cannot pass from thought to existence by means of
another thought, but only by means of some
tertium quid , if such can be found, which shall
connect thought with existence. What is wanted is
to prove that a being corresponding to the idea of
perfection exists ; and it is an obvious evasion of
the point to say that this requirement is satisfied
because the idea of existence is included in the
idea of perfection. And equally fallacious is it to
attempt to bridge the gulf between the idea of the
soul and its eternal existence by saying that life is
essentially involved in that idea. Hence Teich-
mxiller contends with good reason that all that
Plato has proved is that the idea of the soul —
that ideal reality of which all souls partake, but with
which none of them is identified — is immortal and
eternal like all other ideas. In other words, he
contends that Plato only gives us a relation of
ideas; and that, even if we grant to him that ideas
206 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
are eternal principles, yet he has himself taught us
that the same does not hold good of their particular
embodiments. And it is a mere quibble to say that
this case is an exception, because the idea in ques-
tion is the idea of life; for, ex hypothesi , an idea
is distinguished from particular existences, just by
the fact that it is eternal, while they are ever
changing, ever becoming and passing away.
Now, there is a way of repelling the objection
to the ontological argument for the being of God;
though only, it must be confessed, by inverting it,
or challenging the presuppositions on which it was
originally based. That argument, as it is usually
stated, starts with the assumption of an essential
division between thought and being in general, and
then seeks for some special means of transcending
that division in the case of the idea of God. But,
instead of assuming such a dualism to begin with,
we may ask on what grounds it can be asserted.
In other words, we may ask on what grounds
existence is separated from thought, and thought
from existence. When we look at the question in
this way, as I tried to show in dealing with the
Idea of Good, it becomes clear that the distinction
of thought and reality is not an absolute one. It
corresponds, indeed, to a real difference, but that
difference presupposes an identity which is beyond
it. There is an ultimate unity between thought
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 207
and reality, which is postulated in the very act of
opposing them, and without which that act itself
would be meaningless ; for consciousness always
presupposes a relation between the elements it dis-
tinguishes, and therefore a unity which transcends the
distinction. If the subject asserts his own existence
in distinction from the existence of the objective
world, he ipso facto presupposes the unity of the
whole, in which both subjective and objective are
factors. And the principle of that unity must be
recognised by it as the principle at once of knowing
and being ; that is, it must be recognised as the Divine
Being. Thus, if we assert the existence of the mind
that knows in opposition to the world that Is known,
we must also assert the existence of God. We
must recognise the absolute Being who transcends
the distinction of self and not-self, as a principle
apart from which neither the one nor the other
can have any reality or meaning. While, therefore,
we cannot argue from the thought of God to His
existence as an object, we can make a regress from
the opposition of thought and reality to God as
the unity implied in that opposition.
Is it possible to make a similar transformation
of Plato's argument for the immortality of the
soul? And, if so, does Plato himself make it?
It is at once obvious that, in order to do so in
the case of the soul, Plato ^must transcend that
208 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
absolute opposition of the universal and the in-
dividual, which Teiehmiiller and others have regarded
as the essential characteristic of his philosophy.
He must conceive the soul as possessed of what
might be called a ‘ universal individuality/ i.e. an
individuality which is one with its idea, and
which, therefore, partakes of the eternity that be-
longs to the idea. Now, the argument by which,
in the RKaedo, Plato endeavoured to secure an ex-
ceptional position for the soul, is certainly fallacious
as he has there stated it; but we find that, in later
dialogues, he gave it another and less ambiguous
form. For there we find him maintaining, not that
the soul is immortal because it partakes in the
idea of life, but that the ultimate principle of life,
as of all substantial reality, is the soul. We may
clearly trace the development of this thought in
the Republic and the Phaedrus.
In the Republic Plato lays down the principle
that a thing can be destroyed only by its own
evil, by that which specially mars and corrupts its
own nature. Hence the soul cannot be injured by
the diseases of the body or destroyed by its death,
except in so far as these bring with them evils
that directly affect the soul itself, namely, the evils
of injustice and intemperance, folly and ignorance.
But can the soul be destroyed even by these its own
diseases? On the- contrary, we often find that its
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 209
vitality, the intense activity of its life, shows itself
just in and through its vices. “The injustice,
which will murder others, keeps the murderer alive —
aye, and well awake too ; so far removed is her
dwelling-place from being a house of death.” If,
then, the soul cannot be destroyed even by its own
peculiar and characteristic evils, it is absurd to
think that it can receive any vital injury from
the death of the body, which is not in itself con-
nected with such evils. As no one can say that
the decay of the body makes us more unjust,
there is no reason to believe that the soul is
affected by its death. Hence Plato contends that
the soul is an absolutely permanent substance ; that,
therefore, the number of souls must always remain the
same, neither increased nor diminished ; and that all
that their connexion with mortal bodies can do is for
a time to obscure and dim their brightness. But, he
goes on, “in order to see the soul as she really is,
not as we now behold her marred by communion
with the body, we must contemplate her with the
eye of reason in her original purity; for, as she is
now, she is like the sea-god Glaucon, whose original
image can hardly be discerned, because his natural
members are broken off and crushed and damaged
by the waves, and incrustations have grown over
them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he
is more like a monster than his natural form.”
VOL. I. O
210 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
But “we must regard her higher nature as shown
in her love of wisdom, and in her yearning for the
divine to which she is akin /’ 1
How, if we translate this into more modern terms,
I think we can see that Plato means that the
soul, in so far as it is capable of intellectual and
moral life, has a universal principle, or perhaps we
should say, the universal principle in it. Hence
no influence can come to it from without which
is capable of destroying it. Ho calamity which
affects only its body or its mortal individuality
can be fatal to its own life. For though, in one
aspect of it, it is a particular finite being, subject
to all the accidents and changes of mortality, there
is that within it which lifts it above them all. We
might add — though this perhaps would be going
beyond what Plato says in this place and putting
positively what he puts only negatively — that it can
not only rise above them, but can also turn them
into the means of its own development. Outward
misfortune and even death, as Socrates had shown,
it can treat with indifference, and even use them as
an opportunity for the exercise and manifestation of
its own spiritual energy. And as regards what Plato
calls its own proper evils, though undoubtedly the
soul may be divided against itself and weakened by
vice and folly, yet even they cannot penetrate to
1 611 D ff
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
211
the deepest principle of its spiritual life; they can-
not destroy its self-conscious or rational nature,
and therefore they cannot he incurable. Nay, the
universal principle of spiritual life enables it to
turn even its own failures and sins into ‘ stepping-
stones ’ upon which it may 'climb to higher things/
If this is going beyond Plato’s exact words, it seems
to be a natural inference from the principle he here
lays down, that the soul cannot be destroyed by its
own evil, much less by any other kind of evil.
The more positive expression of the same idea,
however, is found in the Phaedrus. In that dialogue
Plato gives us a myth in which the soul of man
is described as a charioteer, driving a chariot with
two horses — which of course represents the reason
in its control over the higher and lower im pulses,
dvjuos and b ridu/ula. The soul-chariot follows the pro-
cession of the gods In their journey round the
universe, and tries like them to rise above the apex
of heaven to the vision of ideal reality, the vision
of essential truth and goodness and beauty: but its
wings often fail to carry it high enough. And when
they fail, it sinks downward to the earth, and becomes
the tenant of a mortal body. In connexion with
this wonderful symbolic myth on which Plato lavishes
all the treasures of his imagination, he suddenly turns
from poetry to philosophy, and argues that the soul,
as such, is immortal, because it is self-moved or
212 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
self-determined : “ Soul in every case is immortal,” he
contends, “for what is ever in motion is immortal,
hut that which moves another and is moved by
another, in ceasing to move, ceases also to live.
Only the self-moving, as it never abandons itself,
never ceases to move, and is the fountain and begin-
ning of motion to all that moves beside. Now, a
beginning or principle cannot have come into being
at any time, for that which comes into being
must have a beginning or principle from which it
comes, but the principle itself cannot come out of
anything else : for if the principle came out of
anything else, it would show itself not to be a
principle. Eut, again, what never begins to be
must also be indestructible : for, if the principle
were destroyed, it could not rise into being out of
anything else, nor anything else out of it, since
all things must come from a principle. The begin-
ning or principle of motion must, therefore, be
found in that which moves itself, and it can itself
have neither death nor birth ; otherwise the whole
universe and the whole process of creation would
collapse and be brought to a stand, and no path
back into motion and existence would remain possible.
If, however, we say that that is immortal which is
moved by itself, we need have no scruple in asserting
that this is the very essence and idea of the soul.
For any body which has the principle of its motion
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
213
outside of itself is ‘ soulless/ while that which has
its principle of motion within and from itself, Is
‘ possessed of a soul/ — implying that this is the very
nature of soul. But if it be granted that that which
moves itself is soul, then of necessity the soul is
unbegotten and immortal . 55 1
This idea of the soul as the first mover is a very
important one in the history of philosophy and
theology, and we shall have to discuss it more fully
hereafter in connexion with the views of Aristotle.
Here I need only say what is necessary for the
explanation of its place in the system of Plato. In
this view, we have, in the first place, to remember
that the term 'motion 5 is used by Plato in a wider
sense than we commonly attach to it, as meaning not
only change of place, but activity in general. For
in the former sense motion always implies the action
of one thing upon another, and absolute self-move-
ment is a contradiction in terms. What Plato means,
therefore, is that the soul has in itself an original
principle of activity, a principle of self-consciousness
and self-determination. He thus carries the idea
suggested in the Republic a step farther: for, while
1 Phaedrus, 245 c. The great difficulty in translating this passage
is that in it Plato’s language is in the very process of changing from
figure to thought, or, as a German would express it, from the Vorstel-
limg to the Begriff. He is in the act of making philosophic terms
out of words in common use. Thus dpxv is just passing from ‘ be-
ginning 5 to ‘principle, 1 yevecns from ‘birth 1 to ‘becoming 1 in
general, and Klvycns from ‘ motion 1 to ‘ activity 1 in general.
214 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
in that dialogue we have the negative thought, that
the soul cannot be destroyed by any evil derived
from another than itself, in the Phaedms we have
the positive counterpart of this, that it is determined,
and can only be determined, by itself. It has a
universal nature and, therefore, it transcends all limits
or hindrances that can be put upon it by other
things. They cannot affect it, or they can affect
it only indirectly through its own action. Even its
confinement in a mortal body is represented as the
result of its own fall from its previous high
estate; and the nature of the body in which it is
imprisoned, as well as its whole lot in this world,
is said to be fixed by its own inner state. “The
soul is form and doth the body make ” : it creates
its own environment, and in successive births it
rises and falls in its outward estate, according to
the goodness or badness of its actions: alria eXo^evov ,
Oeog ammo ?. 1 It is then Plato's doctrine in the
Phaedrus that 'all soul' — and here he makes no
distinction between different grades of souls or even
between the divine being and other souls — is self-
moving or self-determined, and has a spring of eternal
energy in itself; and that, though its spiritual life
may be darkened and obstructed, it can never be
destroyed. For soul is the principle of all reality
both in itself and in all other things. “The soul
1 Rep . , 417 E.
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 215
In its totality/' he declares , 1 “has the care of all
inanimate or soulless being everywhere, and traverses
the whole universe, appearing in divers forms. When
it is perfect and its wings have fully grown, it soars
upward and orders the whole world; but when it
loses its wings, it sinks downward, till it reaches the
solid ground and takes up its abode in an earthly
body, which seems to move of itself but is really
moved by the soul. And this compound of soul and
body is called a living and mortal creature : for
immortal no such union can be believed to be,
though our sensuous imagination, not having seen or
known the nature of God, may picture him as an
immortal creature having a body and a soul which
are united through all time.”
It appears, then, that in the Phaedrus the soul
is taken as the principle of all things, to which all
movement — all activity and actuality — must ultimately
be referred. It is the one absolutely universal, and
therefore absolutely individual existence, which deter-
mines itself and is not determined by anything else,
and which for that reason Is immortal and eternal.
Thus souls seem to attract to themselves the charac-
teristics of ideas, or, at least, to take the place
of ideas, as ultimate principles of being and know-
ing. Further, Plato seems to attribute soul in
this sense, not only to men, but to all living
1 Phaedrus , 246 £.
216 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
creatures. At least he regards them all as alike
in the fundamental principle of their being, how-
ever the manifestation of it may be obstructed
by the kind of body with which it has become
associated. In short, as I have before explained,
all life for Plato is the life of intelligence, more
or less adequately realised. While, therefore, in
all souls that are incarnated in bodies, there is
ipso facto a finite and perishable nature which can-
not survive the crisis of death, there is also in them
a principle which is altogether independent of the
accidents of their mortal part. Hence the individual
who is capable of moral and intellectual activity —
who, in spite of the narrow conditions of mortal
life, can become a ‘spectator of all time and exist-
ence/ and who, in his practical efforts, is guided by
a consciousness, or at least a foretaste and prophetic
anticipation, of the universal good — such an indivi-
dual is essentially self-determined. He has in him
a universal principle of activity or life, and nothing
can be imposed upon him from without which is
not accepted from within. In this way Plato
could maintain the originality and independence of
every spiritual being, as such, even in his lowest
degradation — even when, in his subjection to sense
and appetite, he sinks below humanity : for in all
its transmigrations the soul is conceived as remain-
ing one with itself. There is, indeed, always a
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
217
certain mythic element in Plato’s statement of this
view; and we are not able to say how far he
means what he says of the pre-natal and the
future states to be taken literally. But there
cannot be any reasonable doubt that he attributes
a self-determined and therefore immortal existence
to the soul — or, perhaps we should rather say,
to the reason or spirit; for, in his later and more
definite statements, the soul is taken as the prin-
ciple that connects the pure reason with the mortal
body; and it is only to the spiritual part of man’s
being that the attribute of immortality is assigned.
It is obvious, however, that Plato could not stop
at this point. As he could not rest in the thought
of a multiplicity of ideas without referring them
back to the one Idea of Good, so neither could he
be content with the conception of a multitude of
self-determined and immortal souls without referring
back to one divine reason, as the source and end
of their spiritual life. Hence in the Philebus we
find him speaking of a “ divine intelligence,” which
is the ultimate cause of all order and organi-
sation in the mixed and imperfect nature of man
and of his world. And the same thought is ex-
pressed In the mythical language of the Timaeus ,
where Plato declares that the souls of the gods and
the higher element in the souls of men are the
direct work of the Creator: they are, therefore,
218 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
incapable of being destroyed except by him who has
created them, and he cannot will to destroy what
he has himself made. 1 Thus, in place of a num-
ber of independent spiritual beings, each immortal
in his own right, we have the idea of a kingdom of
spirits, who all, indeed, partake in the divine nature,
and are therefore raised above time and change, but
who, nevertheless, have a dependent and derived
existence and are immortal only through their rela-
tion to God. It is in accordance with t his that in
the Laws , where Plato repeats the argument of the
Phaedrus that the soul is immortal, because it is
self-determined, he applies it only to the divine
Being. God only is the first mover, the source of
life and activity in all other beings. He is the
sovereign will, who has ordered the world as an
organic whole in which each individual has the
exact part to play for which he is fitted. 2 If man be
immortal it is not in his own right as an individual,
but because the divine life is communicated to him.
In other words, we have to prove his im mortality
on the ground that the universal principle of reason,
which is the presupposition of all being and of all
knowledge, is the principle of his own life; and
that all beings, in whom this principle is realised,
must have this nature manifested in them. We
must prove it, in short, because in the language of
1 Tim., 41 a : cf. Leges , 904 a. 2 Leges, 903 b.
AND THE IDEA OF GOD
219
the New Testament “ God is not the God of the
dead, but of the living.” And perhaps this is the
one argument for immortality, to which much weight
can be attached.
It appears, then, that Plato's proof of the
immortality of the soul ultimately resolves itself
into the ontological argument for the being of God;
or rather, we should say, that it is what that argu-
ment becomes when freed from its dualistic pre-
suppositions. In other words, it is a regressive
argument, which carries us back to an ultimate
unity, prior to all difference, and especially to the
difference of thought and being. Further, Plato
maintains that this unity must be conceived as
a supreme intelligence, which, as such, stands in
a peculiar relation to all beings who have the
principle of intelligence in them. These, and these
alone, are regarded as partaking in the divine life,
and, therefore, as lifted above change and death.
All other things are, in comparison with them, only
appearances, which are continually changing and pass-
ing away to make room for others. But they — though
for a time they become denizens of this world of
birth and death, of growth and decay, and may pass
through many transitory forms in the rise and fall
of their spiritual life — do not essentially belong to it,
and their real nature cannot manifest itself clearly
until they are liberated from it.
220 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Plato, then, though in his later dialogues he
gets beyond the abstract antagonism between the
ideal and the sensible worlds, ends by restating
that antagonism in a new form. He has shown
that ideas are not to be conceived as excluding all
difference and relativity, but as elements in an
intelligible world, each of which has its distinct
character, while yet it is essentially bound up with
all the rest. In the second place, he has turned
this idealism into a spiritualism by treating soul or
intelligence as the only thing that can be regarded
as active or self-determined, the only thing that
can be taken as actual or real in the full sense of
the word. Finally, he has suggested that all souls
are to be viewed as derived from, or dependent on,
one divine soul or spirit, who manifests himself in
and to them, so that, in the words of Schiller,
“Aus dem Kelch des Seelen-reichs
Schaumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit.”
But this ideal or spiritual world, which is in per-
fect unity with itself through all its difference, is
still conceived as standing in sharp antithesis to
the world of phenomenal appearance, in which differ-
ence becomes conflict, and conflict produces endless
mutation of birth and death. And the last problem
of the Platonic philosophy or theology is to de-
termine the relation of these two worlds to each
other.
LECTUEE NINTH.
THE FINAL RESULTS OF THE PLATONIC
PHILOSOPHY.
In the last two lectures I attempted to show the
nature of the transition by which Plato passes from
the general doctrine that the idea or universal is
the real, to the doctrine that the ultimate reality
is to be found in mind. Absolute Being, * that which
is in the highest sense of the word,’ must be a
principle which transcends the opposition, maintained
by the earlier schools, between being and becoming,
between the one and the many; and which also
transcends the new opposition, which was brought
into view by Socrates, between the subject and the
object. It cannot be conceived as rest without
motion, as permanence without activity; but as
little can it be conceived as an objective ideal
principle without consciousness or intelligence ; or, on
the other hand, as a mere subjective thought or
state of consciousness without objective reality. If it
is inte llig ence, it is not intelligence as separated by
222 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
abstraction from the intelligible world, but as pre-
supposing and including it. It is 'divine reason/ as
the ultimate unity of all the ideas of things, and
so as the principle at once of knowing and of being.
But this involves another transition. If mind
be the principle of the universe, we cannot con-
template all the parts of the universe as equally
far from it and equally near to it. There are
ideal principles in all things, but the principle of
life and consciousness raises the beings that partake
in it above other beings or things; for all soul is
divine and “has the care of all inanimate or soul-
less being, and traverses the whole universe ” 1
taking one form at one time and another at another.
Every soul, as such, is a self-determining being,
whose life cannot be overpowered or destroyed by
anything external to itself. It is thus immortal,
and above the power of death and time. And if,
in any sense, it be made subject to them, it must
be by its own act.
This at once brings us to a problem which
greatly exercised the mind of Plato in the latest
period of his life, as is shown by the Philebus and
the Timaeus, the problem of the relation of the
ideal to the phenomenal world. In one way this
problem had now become much more complex and
difficult for him ; for he could no longer he
1 Phaedrus , 246
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 223
content, if he ever were content, with the broad
contrast between the permanent and the changing,
the one and the many, seeing that he had recognised
that the ideal world contains both these elements.
The supreme principle could not now be conceived,
If it ever were conceived, as an abstract unity
resting in itself ; it is now definitely recognised as
the keystone of a system, and as one with itself in
all the ideas which it binds into a whole. It is a
conscious and active principle, whose activity mani-
fests itself in every element and part of the
universe. It “ lives through all life, extends through
all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent ” ;
but In a higher sense it reveals itself only in the
individual souls who partake in its immortality.
But, though in this way the ideal world appears
to take up into itself all the characteristics by
which the phenomenal world was at first dis-
tinguished from it, Plato does not give up the
fundamental contrast of the two. The multiplicity
and movement that belong to the ideal world have
still to he distinguished from the multiplicity and
movement which are found in the world of genesis
and change, the world of space and time. When
we pass to the phenomenal, that transparent unity
with itself through all its differences which be-
longs to the pure intelligence, is obscured and
disturbed, and its resting identity with itself in
224
THE FINAL RESULTS OF
all its activities is broken up and lost in opposition
and contradiction. “The light shineth in darkness,
and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” Thus, in
spite of the progress which Plato made towards a
thorough-going idealism, in which the abstract
antagonisms of earlier philosophy were overcome, he
was never able to escape from the dualism implied
in his original contrast of science and opinion.
We might perhaps regard this as due in part to
a mistaken view of the abstraction which is necessary
for science. Every science selects some aspect or
sphere of reality, and isolates it from all other spheres
or aspects of it, in order that it may thoroughly
elucidate that which it has chosen as the object of its
investigation. Every science thus rejects an immense
variety of detail with which its peculiar object is
surrounded, as being for it accidental and irrelevant.
And, though what is irrelevant and accidental for one
science may not be so for another, yet, however far we
go in this direction, there seems to be much in objects
and in their coexistences and successions, which can-
not be explained by any science. Further, even if
philosophy can grasp some Idea of Good — some principle
which unites all the sciences, because it transcends
their limited points of view — yet it must always
be impossible for us to trace the operation of this
principle in the endless detail of changing phenomena
which make up our daily life. The utmost knowledge
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 225
we can attain still leaves the ordinary course of the
world for us a mass of contingencies, of accidental
juxtapositions and successions, of which we can only
say that it is, and not why it is, still less that it is for
the best. 1 Hence our philosophy is too apt to become
an effort to find our way to an ideal world in which
we may take refuge from the confusions of the world
of sense, even though we may acknowledge in words
that it is this ideal world that gives to the world of
sense all the order, significance, and reality which it
possesses. How, it is just here that Plato seems to
take up his position, recognising what we may call the
ideal kernel of existence, which gives to this world all
the intelligible reality It possesses, but unable to see
that in any sense or from any point of view it can be
regarded as a pure manifestation of the ideal. Hence
his optimism, in the strict sense of the word, is
reserved for this ideal kernel, and in regard to every-
thing else he is forced to lower his tone, and to declare
that it is not the best but only as good as it can
1 In the Philtbm (16 d) Plato urges that in the descent from the
unity of the idea to the multiplicity of phenomena, we should
endeavour to carry division by Intelligible principles as far as
possible, subdividing till £< the unity with which we began is seen
not only to be one and many and infinite, but also a definite number;
the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the
entire number of the species intermediate between unity and infinity
has been discovered — then, and not till then, we may rest from
division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless
individuals, may allow them to drop into infinity.”
VOL. I. P
226
THE FINAL RESULTS OF
possibly be in a phenomenal world ; since in that world
the ideal is present only as reflected upon the sensible,
as a “ likeness of good things, but not the perfect
image of those things.” Hence also there is in Plato
a strange fluctuation, both of thought and feeling,
in regard to the phenomenal world. Sometimes it is
almost exalted to the ideal from which it is derived,
and sometimes it is contemned as a phantom world
of shadows which hardly redeems itself from non-
existence. The phenomenal world for Plato is so far
real and divine, as it is a reflexion of the divine
intelligence ; but it is undivine and unreal, because it
is only a reflexion of it.
It is in the Phil eh us and the Timaeus that this view
of the universe gets its fullest expression. In the
former of these dialogues, Plato contrasts the divine
intelligence which is one with itself in all its action,
and so raised above all change and conflict, above all
pleasure and pain, with the complex world of genesis
and decay, of formation and dissolution, where a
principle of order, which is derived from the divine
intelligence, has to maintain itself in an element of
chaos, and more or less successfully to reduce it to a
cosmos. All finite existences, even finite spirits, are a
kind of compromise between what Plato calls the limit
and the unlimited, between a law which would regulate
all things and confine them within definite bounds, and
a vague indeterminate material or basis of phenomenal
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 227
existence, which has no law in itself, and therefore
must receive its determination from without. And,
as that which is determined from without can never
be perfectly determined, so this material 1 is ever ready
to escape from the limitations to which it is subjected,
and to return to the lawlessness from which it has
been redeemed. If it could exist by itself, it would
swing unchecked from excess to defect, from defect to
excess, and the * golden mean 9 could only partially
and for the time be established in it. It is like the
marble of the sculptor, which always has some flaw or
imperfection in it that makes it a less than perfect
embodiment of his idea ; or like the forces of nature,
which can be subjected to man’s design, but have no
direct affinity with the purpose they are made to serve
and never exactly conform themselves to it. This
disconformity shows itself in the continual passing
away of everything finite, in the defects that attach
to all natural existences, above all in the continual
division and conflict of human life. In man this
contrast of the material with the ideal which realises
itself in it, appears as the opposition of mind and
sense, of the intelligence that apprehends and seeks
the good with the impulses which, left to themselves,
tend to any object that promises pleasure without
asking whether, or how far, the good is realised in it.
2 1 use this word as a convenient expression, though it suggests
something more definite and substantial than Plato’s &Treioov,
228 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
The ideal of man’s life is that it should exhibit in
itself “an immaterial principle of order maintaining
a noble sovereignty over a living body ” ; 1 and this
involves not only the subordination of the natural
to the spiritual, but also the most perfect order
and gradation of all spiritual aims, and the restriction
of enjoyment to pleasures that are simple and pure —
pleasures that accompany the highest activities of the
soul and do not disturb them. But such an ideal
can never be completely realised in the f mingled’ and
divided nature of man.
The same contrast is expressed in another way in
the Timaeus, where Plato gets over some of its diffi-
culties by adopting a mythic form of expression.
“ We must first,” he declares, “ make a distinction of
the two great forms of being and ask : What is that
which is and has no becoming, and what is that which
is always becoming and never is ? The former, which
is apprehended by reason and reflexion, is changeless
and ever one with itself ; the latter, which is appre-
hended by opinion through irrational sensation, is
ever coming into being and perishing, but never
really is. Now, everything that begins to be, must be
brought into being by some cause ; for without a cause
it is impossible for anything to be originated. But
whatever things have been produced by the Creator,
moulding the form and character of his work after the
1 Philebu^j 64 p,
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 229
pattern of that which is ever the same, are of neces-
sity beautiful ; while those things which he has
produced after the pattern of that which has come
to be — a pattern which is itself not original but
created — cannot be beautiful. Now as to the whole
sphere of heaven, the ordered universe, or whatever we
please to call it, our first enquiry in this as in every
other subject must be, whether it always existed and
had no birth or origination from anything else than
itself, or whether it came into being and had a begin-
ning in something else. It did begin to be, I reply; for
it is visible and tangible, and it has a material body ;
and of all such sensible things, winch are apprehended
by opinion with the aid of sense, we must say that
they are in process of becoming and are the results of
such a process ; hence we must needs say that it had
a cause.”
“Now the Maker and Father of this universe is
hard to find, and even if we had found him it would
be impossible to reveal him to all men. There is,
however, an enquiry which w T e may make regarding
him, to wit, which of the patterns he had in view
when he fashioned the universe, — the pattern of the
unchangeable, or of that which has come to be.
If the world indeed be beautiful and its artificer
good, it is manifest that he must have had in
view the eternal as his model and pattern ; but if
the reverse be true, which cannot be said without
230 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
blasphemy, then he had in view the pattern which
has come to be. Now anyone can see that he looked
to the eternal as his pattern; for the world is the
most beautiful of creatures, and he is the best of
causes. Having, then, come into being in this way,
we may say that it has been created in the image
of that which is apprehended only by reason and
intelligence, and which eternally is. The universe,
then, it appears, is a copy and not an original.”
“Now in every discussion it is most important to
make a beginning which agrees with the nature of the
subject of which we treat. Hence in speaking of a
copy and its original, we must see that our words are
kindred to the matter which they have to express.
When they relate to the abiding and unchangeable
reality which is apprehended by reason, they must be
fixed and unchanging, and, in so far as it is possible for
words to be so, they must be incapable of refutation
or alteration. But when they relate to that which
is an image, though made in the likeness of the
eternal, they need only have likelihood and make
such an approach to exactness as the case admits;
for truth stands to belief as being to becoming.
If, then, amid the many opinions about the gods
and the generation of the universe, we are not able
in every respect to render all our ideas consistent
with each other and precisely accurate, no one need be
surprised. Enough, if we are able to give an account
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 231
which is no less likely than another; for we must
remember that I who speak, and you who judge of
what I say, are mortal men, so that on these subjects
we should be satisfied with a likely story, and demand
nothing more.” 1
In this passage Plato makes a broad division
between the eternal reality of things and the world
of becoming and change, and a corresponding division
between the faculties of the soul by which they
are severally apprehended, the former being the
object of the pure intelligence and of knowledge,
the latter of opinion, or, in other words, of a judg-
ment directly based on sense. And it is to be
noticed that by this he does not mean merely that
opinion is a kind of knowledge which is imperfect by
reason of the weakness of our minds. He means
that this imperfection lies in the nature of the ease ;
for no changing finite existence can be the object
of the pure intelligence, winch always contemplates
that which absolutely is. The phenomenal world
can be pictured by the imagination but, strictly
speaking, it can never be understood. It is seen
under the form of time which Is the moving image
of eternity and breaks up the eternal 'now' into
past, present, and future. The 4 is,’ w T hich is the
only tense of science, loses its highest sense in the
dubious region of phenomena which are continually
1 Timaeua , 27 e s&q.
232 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
changing. It is true that there is something like
the unity and permanence of absolute being in
the recurrent movement of the heavenly bodies,
which, passing through long cycles of change, are
supposed ever to return again to their original
order and to resume their courses. And in another
way we have the same return of the time-process
upon itself in the course of animal life, which, as
Plato says, imitates eternity by the continual repro-
duction of the species in new individuals, who go
through the same cycle of change. 1 In this world
of generation and decay, however, we find no
substantial existence, no permanent reality that
ever remains one with itself: for, even if we go
down to the four original elements, we find them
also changing into one another. Nothing, therefore,
that we know or experience in this world, seems to
have a substantive reality of its own, or to be more
than, so to speak, an adjective or passing phase of
existence. And, if we ask what is the substance of
which such adjectives are predicated, we are obliged
to say that it is a thing of which in itself and
apart from these adjectives, we can say nothing.
“ Suppose an artificer who has given all sorts of
shapes to a piece of gold, to be incessantly remoulding
it, substituting one shape for another; and suppose
somebody to be pointing to one of them, and to ask
1 Symposium, 207 d.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 23:3
what it is : the safest answer that could be made
would be, that it was gold ; but as to the triangles
and other shapes the gold had taken, it would be
best not to speak of these shapes as if they really
existed, seeing that they change even while we are
making the assertion. . . . Now the same argument
applies to the universal nature that receives all
bodies. It must be always regarded as the same, as
it never departs from its own nature. For, while
receiving all indiscriminately, it never itself assumes
a form like any of those things that enter into it. It,
indeed, is the original recipient of all impressions,
and is moved and transformed by them, and appears
different from time to time by reason of them :
but the things that go in and out, are but
imitations of realities, modelled after their image
in a way hard to explain, which w T e shall discuss
hereafter.” 1
Plato then goes on to say that this receptive nature,
being itself formless though it receives all forms, is
hard to define, but that the admission of its reality
is forced upon us by the necessity of providing a
substratum in which the change to which all things
are subjected may take place; and that in spite of
the fact that its changes are so complete that they
seem to leave nothing at all behind which can he
regarded as constituting such a substratum. An d
1 Tim . , 50 A si q.
234 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
he sums up his whole doctrine as to the real, the
phenomenal, and its basis or substratum in the
following passage which contains in it the germs of
much later speculation. “ We must agree that there
is one kind of being which is always the same,
uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything
into itself from without, nor itself going out to
any other, but invisible and imperceptible by sense,
and of which the perception is granted to intelligence
alone. And there is another kind of being which
bears the same name with this and is similar to it,
a created being which is always in motion, coming to
be in a certain place and again perishing out of it,
and which is apprehended by sense and opinion.
And there is a third kind of being, namely, space,
which is eternal and indestructible but provides
a seat for all the changeful forms of existence, and
which is apprehended without the aid of sense by
a kind of spurious reason and is hard to believe in.
Looking to this tertium quid as in a kind of dream,
we say of all existence that it must be somewhere
and occupy a space, and that that which has no place
either in earth or in heaven, cannot be anything at
all. And such is the power of this dream of ours
that it makes us unable when we wake to realise
the truth, to wit, that an image, or reflexion — seeing
that by its essential nature and function, it has no
basis in itself but is the flitting shadow of something
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 235
else — must have something else than itself, in which
it is and by means of which it lays hold upon
existence: otherwise it will be reduced to nothing
at all. On the other hand, in order to vindicate
the reality of the real v T e must call in the aid of
the following accurate rule of reason, namely, that
if there be anything which has two different con-
stituents, it is impossible that one of these consti-
tuents should inhere in the other in such a way
that they shall form a self -identical unity in spite
of their difference .” 1
The train of thought here is a little difficult to
follow. In the first place, Plato maintains that
that which changes, as such, cannot be absolutely
real, cannot have that permanent reality which
science seeks to grasp. And as this change extends
to all the qualities which v T e recognise in the phe-
nomenal object, we are driven, in seeking for
permanent reality, to look beneath the qualities for
something which is equally receptive of them all.
This common basis is then taken as the quasi-sub-
stance of things sensible, while yet, as absolutely
indeterminate, it is not a proper substance at all.
To Plato a true substance must be a perfectly
definite and determined object of knowledge, and, in
1 Thai., 52 a seq. Plato means that the phenomenal, as a com-
bination of an image with that which is its substratum, has not
unity with itself, and therefore cannot he regarded as a substantial
reality.
2:36
THE FINAL RESULTS OF
this point of view, the qualitative states through
which the substratum passes are more like substances
than the supposed substratum itself; yet they cannot
be taken as substances, because they change and pass
away. Such, then, is the strange puzzle of pheno-
menal existence. We know it under distinct pre-
dicates which are definable, but which in it are
continually changing; and on the other hand, the
substance, to which we seem obliged to refer these
predicates, turns out to have no intelligible character.
It is something which we are driven to assert as real
by what Plato calls a “spurious and illegitimate
reasoning/’ that is, by the argument that, as every par-
ticular kind of existence has a material out of which
it is formed, so all the forms of existence, as they
change into each other, must have a substratum in
which the change takes place. Of this substratum,
however, we are able to give no account, except that
it is the seat of everything else — that to which we
refer when we say that everything must be some-
where : in other words, it seems to be one with the
condition of being in space, to which all sensible
existence is subjected. Yet we are not able to con-
ceive empty space as a substance, in which qualities
inhere and changes take place. This riddle of phe-
nomenal existence, however, is partially explained
when we recognise that phenomenal existence is
essentially an image or reflexion of something else
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 237
than itself, and that, therefore, we are obliged to think
of it as a reflexion in something else than itself.
Thus the image in one way looks to the Ideal reality
as its substance, and in another way to that in
which it has, so to speak, its local habitation. It
is characteristic of the phenomenal that it can be
presented to us only through this curious combina-
tion of metaphor and analogical inference, but no
such ambiguous nature could possibly belong to that
which is real in the full sense of the word.
But we cannot leave the matter at this point.
If Plato be right in saying that we fall into an
illegitimate way of thinking when we attribute in-
dependent substance to the phenomenal, he cannot
he right in saying that such a way of thinking is
necessary. He is, in fact, attempting to find a
w r ay between the two horns of a dilemma. He is
trying to conceive the ideal as manifesting itself in
the phenomenal, and yet at the same time, as having
an absolute reality which is complete in itself with-
out any manifestation. Conversely, he would like to
treat the phenomenal as if it were nothing at all,
or at least a £ mere appearance ’ winch adds nothing
to the ideal reality. Yet he cannot deny that even an
appearance or Image has a kind of reality of its own,
and that it needs to be accounted for. Hence, wflien
he abandoned the simple method of Parmenides, who
denied that phenomena have any reality at all, he
238 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
was obliged to treat them as an illegitimate kind of
substances — which jet are no true substances, be-
cause they do not belong to the ideal or intelligible
world. The only possible escape from this logical
impasse, would have been to set aside altogether the
abstract opposition of the ideal world and the world in
space and time, and to substitute for it the conception
that they are correlative factors in the one real world.
If Plato had adopted this course, he would have
done justice equally to the distinction and to the
unity of these factors; and he would have avoided
the opposite dangers of an abstract monism and of
an irreconcilable dualism. He would have conceived
the intelligible reality, or the divine intelligence
which is its central principle, not as resting in
itself, but as essentially self -revealing ; and he would
have treated the world in space and time as its
necessary manifestation. Are there any traces of
such a view in Plato ?
Before answering this question, let me first refer to
the fact that Plato here identifies the substratum of
phenomena with that which attaches spatial condi-
tions to them, so that every one of them must be
somewhere. We must remember, however, that this,
whatever it is, has already been represented by Plato
as also attaching temporal conditions to them : so that
every one of them must be in a £ now/ which is only a
State of transition from what it was to what it will
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 239
be. 1 Plato’s thought, then, seems to be that the world
in space and time is a sort of disrupted and distorted
image of the intelligible world, in which the organic
unity and eternal self-consistency of the ideal loses
itself in dissonance and change. For, as reflected into
space, the pure unity of ideas with each other through
all their differences, is exchanged for the combination
of parts which are external to each other and without
unity in themselves ; and, as reflected into time, the
ideal movement of the intelligence, which remains one
with itself in all its activity because it grasps its
whole system in every idea, is turned into the
vicissitude of an external sequence in which one thing
is continually passing away to make room for another.
With this Plato combines the further conception,
that that which is essentially self-external, as in
space, and essentially in flux, as in time, must be
1 It would involve a long discussion to explain all that Plato says
on this subject. We may agree with Baumker ( Problem der Materie
in der Griech. Phil., p. 184 seq.) that Plato is led by Pythagorean
influence to identify matter with space, and that, consequently, he
gives a purely mathematical explanation of the four elements as
figures formed by the combination of planes. But it is to be noted
that Plato immediately proceeds to speak of it as the ‘nurse of
genesis/ and to trace the continual change of sensible things to the
inequality of the determination of different parts of space by differ-
ent figures, which are, therefore, continually conflicting and passing
into each other. They are, as it were, shapes which appear for a
moment and vanish to make room for others. The idea of exter-
nality is thus immediately connected in Plato’s mind with the ideas
of conflict and of the consequent flux of becoming. And both seem
to imply something analogous to the Aristotelian VXy.
240 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
externally determined in all its changes. Hence the
phenomenal is contrasted with the intelligible world,
or, what is the same thing, with the intelligence, as
that which is moved by another with that which Is
moved by itself; or, in other words, as that which
is under the sway of necessity with that which is
self-determined or free. 1 But though primarily and
In itself the phenomenal world is the sphere of neces-
sity, even in it Plato holds that actually necessity
is subjected to a higher principle, which, however,
never completely does away with it. “ All these
things, constituted as they are by the necessity of
nature, the Creator of what is best in the world of
becoming took to himself at the time when he was
producing the self-sufficing and most perfect God; 2
and while he used the necessary causes as his
ministers in the accomplishment of his work, it was
by his own art that he realised the good in all the
creation. Wherefore we must distinguish two kinds
of causes, the necessary and the divine; and, so far
as our nature admits, we must make the divine in
1 It is to be observed, that Plato views that which is moved by
another as entirely passive, and that he has no idea of any reaction
involved in the transmission of motion. The abstract contrast of that
which is self-moved with that which is moved by another, t.e. pure
activity with pure passivity, is what makes the union of mind and
body so accidental and external with Plato.
2 Tim . , 68 e seq. The universe as an organic whole, as we shall
see in the sequel, is conceived by Plato as a £ second God,’ who is as
like as possible to the first.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 241
all cases our end and aim; but we must seek the
necessary causes for the sake of the divine, consider-
ing that, without them and isolated from them, it
is impossible for us to know or attain or in any
way share in those highest things which are the
objects we really desire.”
Eeason, in short, realises its designs in the world
only so far as necessity will permit ; it rules, in Plato's
metaphor, by 1 persuading necessity ’ ; and necessity
can never be completely persuaded. Hence, in our
enquiry into the nature of the world, as Plato had
already pointed out in the Phaedo , we have to study
both the causes of things, i.e. both the ends realised in
them, and the conditions sine quibus non , imposed
upon their realisation by the material in which they
are realised. But we can never bring these two
together, or conceive the necessity of nature as
anything more than an external and partly recal-
citrant means whereby the purposes of reason have
to be realised.
We end, therefore, with a conception of the
phenomenal world as the resultant of two kinds of
causation, which cannot be brought to a unity; for
we cannot in any way bridge over the gulf between
the actus purus of reason and the mere passivity of
corporeal existence, which is supposed to be able to
receive and transmit motion or action, but not to
originate it. The only way, therefore, in which the
vol i, q
242 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
two can be united is by the external subjection of the
one to the other ; and this subjection, just because it
is external, can never be complete; for, where the
means are not inherently related to the end, the end
can never be perfectly achieved. It does not occur
to Plato to ask whether either of the abstractions
between which he has divided the world — the
abstraction of pure activity or the abstraction of
pure passivity — is intelligible by itself, or can be
regarded as representing any reality. On the con-
trary, he treats the former as that which alone is
absolutely real and intelligible ; and his only problem
is to explain how the latter can exist, or be thought
at all. This problem he seeks to solve by the
externality or spatial character of all corporeal
existences ; for, as realised in space, the ideal forms are
torn asunder from each other and even from them-
selves, and their difference shows itself as disharmony
and conflict. And, finally, when he has to meet
the difficulty of conceiving extension or space as a
substance, he finds his escape in the conception that
the phenomenal world is a world of images which, as
such, cannot be made intelligible and cannot therefore
be regarded as absolutely real, yet which cannot be
denied all reality. This baffling ambiguity of nature
withdraws it from the cognisance of science, and
assigns it to the sphere of opinion. On the other
]rand, it is the nature of the ideal reality of things
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 243
to be transparently one with itself in all its differ-
ence ; as it is the nature of the pure intelligence to
comprehend such reality, apart from all the confusions
of the appearance. We are left, therefore, with a
dualism which is at once subjective and objective;
nor is it anywhere admitted that there is a principle
which can dissolve the contradiction and reduce the
two worlds to one.
Yet, while we say this, we must at the same
time notice that Plato does supply us with a sug-
gestion which might have removed this difficulty, if
only he had fully developed its consequences. For,
after all, Plato does not accept the doctrine that
the relation of the real to the phenomenal is
an altogether external or accidental relation. On
the contrary, he not only refers the phenomenal to
the ideal, as its cause, but he finds in the latter a
kind of necessity for the former.
In the first place, let us look at what he says of
the reason for the existence of the world. “ Let me
tell you why nature and this universe of things was
framed by him who framed it. God is good ; and in
a perfectly good being no envy or jealousy could ever
exist in any case or at any time. Being thus far
removed from any such feeling, he desired that all
things should be as like himself as it was possible
for them to be. This is the sovereign cause of the
existence of the world of change, which we shall do
244 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
well to believe on the testimony of wise men of
old. God desired that everything should be good
and nothing evil, so far as this was attainable.
Wherefore, finding the visible world not in a state
of rest but moving in an irregular and disorderly
fashion, out of disorder he brought order, thinking
that in every w 7 ay this was better than the other.
Now it is impossible that the best of beings should
ever produce any but the most beautiful of works.
The Creator, therefore, took thought and discerned
that out of the things that are by nature visible,
no work, destitute of reason, could be made, which
would be so fair as one that possessed reason, set-
ting whole against whole. He saw also that reason
could not dwell in anything that is devoid of soul.
And because this was his thought, in framing the
world he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body,
that he might be the maker of the fairest and
best of works. Hence, taking the account of things
that has most likelihood, we ought to affirm that
the universe is a living creature endowed with soul
and intelligence by the providence of God .” 1
Even making some allowance for the mythic form
of this statement, we can see that Plato finds in
the goodness of God the reason for the creation of
the world. The ideal reality, which in its ultimate
conception is one with the divine intelligence, is
1 Tim., 29 E seq.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 245
not conceived as indifferent to all that is outside of
it, but as by the necessity of its nature going beyond
itself, and manifesting itself in the universe. Yet,
on the other hand, this necessity is conceived as a
conditional one, implying the previous existence of
something else external to the divine being, some-
thing which has no order in itself, and therefore
must receive order, must be turned from chaos to
cosmos, by the operation of the divine intelligence.
And, just because of this, the universe, though
the 'best of all possible worlds/ is not conceived
as in itself essentially good. It is good so far as
the nature of the case admits, or so far as the
material to be used is capable of goodness. But
this material is in itself formless, and even when
it is brought under form, it never is completely
subjected thereto. It, therefore, brings division, con-
flict and change into the life of the created universe ;
or, putting it in another way, it makes that universe
phenomenal and unreal, or real only with the partial
reality of an image, which has no substance in
itself, but only in that which produces it. Thus,
just because the divine intelligence is not conceived
as essentially self-manifesting but as manifesting
itself only in relation to something given from
without, Plato’s pregnant conception of the goodness
of God loses its meaning, and the phenomenal and
the real are again divorced from each other.
246 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
We must, however, call attention to a second
attempt of Plato to bridge the gulf between the
eternal intelligence and the transitory world of
sense, namely, by means of the idea of the soul as
an intermediate or mediating existence. It is, in-
deed, quite in the manner of Plato to introduce a
middle term between extremes which he is unable
directly to unite. Thus the soul itself is described
as compounded of the elements of 4 the same’ and
"the other/ i.e. of the self-identical unity of the
idea and the unmediated difference of space, w T hich
are held together by an ovcria, or essential being
that contains both these elements . 1 But such an
expedient only raises the same difficulty in a new
form. For, if the extremes be absolutely opposed
to each other, the middle term that connects them
w T ill itself require another middle term to unite its
discordant elements. Now, in the present case, the
intelligence and the bodily nature are conceived as
essentially disparate, and the soul, which partakes
of both, cannot be regarded as transcending or
reconciling their difference. Hence neither for the
connexion of the divine intelligence with the world,
nor for the connexion of the intelligence of man
with his body, can we find a mediating principle
in the soul. And in the soul itself the pure
principle of thought breaks away from the powers
1 Timaeus , 35 A.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 247
of sensation and appetite which are connected with
the bodily existence ; nor is it possible to discover
any link of connexion between them, either in the
discursive reason, or in those higher desires which
are summed up by Plato under the name of dujuos.
And this leads to a further result in relation to the
question of immortality. Por that which is essen-
tially connected with the body must share its fate.
But if none of the powers of the soul are to survive
the body, in what sense can it he said that man as
an individual has any permanent being which is not
touched by death ? That which abides can only he
a pure universal intelligence, without memory or
individual consciousness, which can hardly be dis-
tinguished from the divine intelligence. Indeed,
even the idea of God as an individual Being seems
to disappear when he is conceived as a purely con-
templative intelligence, who is complete in himself,
apart from any manifestation in the world. These
results of his dualistic view were not, indeed, realised
by Plato, but they begin to show themselves in the
metaphysic of Aristotle. Meanwhile they were held
in cheek by other tendencies of Plato, and especially,
as I have already indicated, by his conception of
the goodness of God, as leading to the communica-
tion of good to all his creatures.
Closely connected with the idea of the mediation
of the soul, is another doctrine of which we find
248 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
considerable traces in the Philebus and the Timaeus ,
but which we know mainly through the Aristotelian
criticism of it. Aristotle tells us that Plato in
his later years laid great emphasis upon the con-
ceptions of number and measure, and, indeed, that
he represented the quantitative determinations of
things with which mathematical science has to deal
as a special kind of existences, which lie midway
between the ideal and the sensible, differing from
the latter by their generality, and from the former
by their multiplicity ; for we can have many identical
repetitions of the same numbers or figures, but there
cannot be two identical ideas. We may suspect
that in the statement of this theory Aristotle, with
his usual tendency to insist on differences, has fixed
and hardened the distinctions of Plato, and thereby
given them a somewhat strange and unnatural ap-
pearance : but what we actually find in the Platonic
dialogues enables us partially to understand what is
meant. In most of his works, indeed, Plato does not
hesitate to speak of ideas of number and quantity;
but in the later dialogues we can trace a growing
tendency to regard such conceptions, not as ideas, but
as conditions of the manifestation of the ideas in
the sensible or phenomenal world. Already in the
Republic the mathematical sciences are referred to
the discursive reason, as distinguished from dialectic
which is referred to the pure or intuitive intelligence ;
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 249
though the main difference between them which is
distinctly stated is that these sciences do not go back
to first principles, but are based upon hypotheses
which have only a relative generality.
In the Philebus, however, the divine cause of all
things, the ideal principle of all reality, is clearly
distinguished from what is called ‘ the limit 5 (to
Trepas) : that is, from the measure or quantitative
determination, to which in the phenomenal world
‘ the unlimited } element (to aireipov) is subjected, in
order to bring within bounds the endless possibility
of increase and diminution which is characteristic
of that element. The pure unity of the ideal or
intelligible reality, in which the whole is present,
in every part — or, w T hat is the same thing in
another aspect, the absolute self-identity of the
divine intelligence, which is one with itself in all
its activity and therefore combines in one the
attributes of rest and motion — this pure unity and
identity has to manifest itself in the sensible
world as a law which determines the quantita-
tive relations of the elements of each particular
existence, and the order and extent of its changes.
And the same mediating principle of measure
can be observed also in the soul of naan, in so
far as there is an order and harmony of the
inner life, which maintains itself in all the endless
vicissitudes of states due to its association with the
250
THE FINAL RESULTS OF
body. Thus the good of man consists in the due
regulation of all the elements of his nature, or, as
Plato expresses it, in the “ rule of an immaterial order
over a living body”; and this is clearly distinguished
from the absolute Good, which has in it no dis-
tinction of parts, and in which, therefore, there is
no need for one part to conti ol another. Thus the
pure organic unity of the ideal translates itself in
the sensible world into the quantitative proportion
of different elements, as determined by laws which
maintain themselves, not absolutely but with rela-
tive constancy, amid all the difference and change
of nature and of the soul of man. This might be
otherwise expressed by saying that the good in its
manifestation becomes the beautiful; for beauty is
dependent on symmetry and proportion . 1
The same fundamental conception is repeated in the
Timaeus, where ‘the unlimited’ of the Philebus is iden-
tified primarily with space and secondarily with time.
In the Timaeus, therefore, it is represented that the
ideal, as reflected into the dispersion of space and
the flux of time, is partly infected by the character-
istics of these forms ; but it recovers itself in so
far as the externality of spatial existence is brought
under the unity of definite geometrical figures, and
its changes are determined to a definite order of
succession. Further, this succession is conceived as
1 Philebus, 64 E.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 251
constantly repeating itself, so that, through a long
cycle of movement, everything is brought back again
and again to the same point. We are thus able to
understand how it was that the mathematical rela-
tions became for Plato the expression of the ideal
in the sensible, and in what sense Aristotle could
justly attribute to him the doctrine that they form
a kind of ‘ intermediates ’ (ra fxera^v) between the
two. But it is manifest that this doctrine fails in
the same way as the doctrine of the mediation
of the soul ; for time and space are simply pre-
supposed or assumed as existing external to the
reality and the ideal; nor is there anything in its
nature, as Plato has described it, which can supply
a rationale for its being reflected into space and
time, so as to give rise to the phenomenal world.
In both cases we see Plato endeavouring to escape
from the difficulties of an absolute division by the
introduction of a middle term — an expedient which
for reasons already given must necessarily fail. Por
no mediation between two extremes is possible, unless
we can find a higher principle which transcends them
both and reduces them to different forms or expres-
sions of its own unity.
There is, however, still one other form of expres-
sion, by which Plato seeks to escape the difficulties
of dualism; and it is one which deserves special
attention, because of its influence upon Christian
252 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
theology. The phenomenal world — which, as we have
seen, is conceived by Plato as a living being with
a soul and a body — is represented in the Tinmens
not only as the image or reflexion of the intelligible
world, but also as a ‘ second god/ Thus, though it has
only a derived existence, it is regarded as possessing
a relative completeness and self-sufficiency, which
entitle it to be called divine, in contrast with all
other creatures which draw from it their being and
well-being. Furthermore, this £ second god ’ is called
the ‘son’ and even the c only-begotten son’ of the
first God. This idea is expressed in the concluding
words of the Timaeus: “All our discourse about
the nature of the universe hath here an end. Having
received all living beings, mortal and immortal, into
itself and being therewith replenished, this world
has come into existence in the manner explained
above, as a living being which is itself visible and
embraces all beings that are visible. It is, therefore,
an image of its maker, a god manifested to sense,
the greatest and best, the most beautiful and per-
fect of all creatures, even the one and only-begotten
universe.” With this idea of the sonship of the
phenomenal universe — which is conceived as a living
and conscious individual embracing all other creatures
in itself — Plato seems almost to cross the border
that separates the dualistic philosophy of Greece
from the peculiar doctrines of Christianity. But,
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 253
after all, it remains with him simply a strong
metaphor, conveying indeed the idea of the near-
ness of the derivative to its original, but still
excluding the thought of any unity that really
transcends the difference. All we can say is, that
the ambiguous nature of the phenomenal world makes
Plato at one time exalt it almost to the ideal, and
at another time set it in almost absolute opposition
thereto; and that here, in his final utterances, we
find him dwelling more on the positive than on
the negative aspect of the relation 1
We seem, then, in the Timaeus , which may be
regarded as the last word of Plato's theology, to be
brought to a somewhat ambiguous conclusion, a sort
of open verdict, which may be interpreted in two
opposite ways according as we emphasise one or
the other of the aspects of his thought. On the one
hand, if we lay stress upon Plato’s synthesis of
*1 have not said anything of the two souls, the good and the
evil soul, of which Plato speaks in the Lares (896 e), as principles to
which the origin of tilings is to be referred. The idea of an evil
soul is directly excluded by the Politicm (270 a), and it is difficult
to see how Plato’s principles could possibly admit of it. We
may explain the admission of it by the popular character of the
Lairs or by the tendency to pessimism which was characteristic
of its editor. And we may observe that though the hypothesis
of two souls is admitted for the moment, no use is made of the
idea of the evil soul in the sequel, in which Plato seems to refer
the whole universe to a good principle, and that without suggest-
ing the existence of any opposite principle, like the dirupov of the
PMiebus.
254 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
opposites, upon his attempted reconciliation of Par-
menides and Heraclitus, upon his conception of mind
as a self-moving principle which produces motion
in all other things, and lastly, upon his conception
of God as a goodness which communicates itself and
therefore is the cause of being and well-being to
all his creatures, we seem to be brought within sight
of an absolute idealism, which transcends all distinc-
tions, even the distinction of the material and the
spiritual. On the other hand, if we lay stress upon
the sharp contrast which he draws between intelli-
gence and necessity, between that which is the self-
moving and self-determined and that which is moved
and determined by another, between the unity through
ill difference and the permanence through all activity
which belong to the real or intelligible world, and
the self-externality and endless flux which are
iharacteristic of the phenomenal, we shall find in
the Platonic writings a scheme of doctrine which is
essentially dualistic, and even, as regards the world
)f sense, pessimistic. It is only if we keep all
the threads together that we can understand the
loftiness of his idealism, and the way in which he
)ften seems to reject its consequences. Thus he
rolds that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds/
}he image of the invisible, the manifestation of the
goodness of God, and even that it is a ‘second
jod’: yet at the same time he is able to declare.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 255
that “ evils can never pass away ; for there must needs
exist something which stands opposed to the good.
They have no seat among the gods, but of necessity
they cling to the nature of mortal creatures, and
haunt the region in which we dwell” 1 In like
manner, Plato's absolute confidence in philosophy
as the supreme gift of God to man, does not pre-
clude an almost agnostic tone in many places of
Ms writing, as when he declares that ‘ £ the Father
and Maker of this universe is hard to find out”
and that even if we could find him, it would not
be possible to communicate what we know to other
men. We know God, Plato seems to say, through
the world which is his reflexion; but it is a world
of genesis and decay in which the divine can only be
imperfectly adumbrated; and we ourselves, though
rational and so partakers of the divine nature, are
in another aspect of our being only fragmentary
and imperfect existences — parts of the partial world,
who can never completely gather into their minds
the meaning of the whole. “It is hard to exhibit
except by analogies, any of the things that are
most important: for each of us seems to know
everything as In a dream, and, again, in waking
reality to know nothing at all.” 2 This strange
alternation between the consciousness of absolute
knowledge as his portion, and the sense that what he
1 Tkeaet. 176 4- 2 Politic us f 277 B*
256
THE FINAL RESULTS OF
knows is only a foretaste of something greater, is,
however, not such a paradox as it seems. As the
religious man says : “ I believe, help thou mine un-
belief,” "so. the great idealistic philosopher feels it
no contradiction to say: “I know,” while yet he
can hardly find expressions strong enough to char-
acterise his ignorance. He knows, we might say,
simply because he can, like Socrates, measure his
ignorance. He has an idea of the whole, as an
outline which he cannot fill up, though his whole
life is a progress in filling it, and the goal he seeks
is assured to him from the beginning. As man and
as philosopher, Plato is conscious that he is born
to be “a spectator of all time and existence,” and
he never thinks of the highest reality as inacces-
sible to the intelligence. It is, as I have shown, an
extreme misunderstanding of the words which he
uses about the Idea of Good when the Neo-Platonists
attribute to him the notion of an absolute unity,
in which all distinction is lost, and which therefore
cannot be apprehended except in an ecstasy in which
thought and consciousness are annihilated. On the
contrary, it is his fundamental thought that that
which is most real is most knowable, and that which
is most knowable is most real . 1 It is not, therefore,
in the silence and passivity of the spirit, but in its
highest and most perfect activity, that it comes
1 Rap., 477 a.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 257
nearest to the divine; and it is only because this
activity is obstructed and weakened by our mortal
nature, that we do not know God fully and as he is.
There has been much discussion among theologians
about the immanency or transcendency of God, but
it is not quite easy to determine what is meant by
these words. If by the transcendency of God be
meant that there is in the principle of the in-
telligible world something not intelligible, we cannot
speak of it without contradicting ourselves. The
assertion of such transcendency is an attempt to
reach a highest superlative, an attempt which over-
leaps itself, and ends by saying nothing at all God
is a word that has no significance, unless by it we
mean to express the idea of a Being who Is the
principle of unity presupposed in all the differences
of things, and in all our divided consciousness of them.
In this sense, then, we must think of God as essentially
immanent in the world and accessible to our minds.
But from another point of view, the principle of unity
in the world must necessarily transcend the whole of
which it is the principle; and every attempt to
explicate this principle into a system of the universe,
made by those who are themselves parts of that
system, must be in many ways inadequate. The
microcosm can apprehend, but cannot fully comprehend,
the macrocosm. In trying to realise the unity of the
whole we seem only to advance from part to part,
VOL. I. R
258 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
from finite to finite, so that “ the margin fades for
ever and for ever as we move” The articulation
of knowledge always lacks something which the self-
involved religious sentiment seems to possess ; though
on the other hand, that sentiment, if it be not
continually explicating itself, soon becomes abstract
and empty. For a unity that does not go out into
diversity, and cannot therefore return upon itself from
it, is no real unity. Thus religion, in one aspect of
it, is apt to become opposed to science and also to
practical morality, as a contemplative consciousness
that is beyond all the discourse of reason and all
the deliberative action of the practical understanding.
And even philosophy seems to be an enemy to religion,
because, in spite of its striving after unity, it is
obliged in the first instance to proceed by analysis,
to work out every difference to its utmost conse-
quences, and only to return to unity of principle
through the reconciliation of opposites. Further, as
this return is always being made, but never is
made finally, conclusively and once for all; so there
always seems to be a gap between the effort to
recognise and realise God in the world, and the
religious intuition of piety which takes that recognition
and realisation as complete. And that gap may be
supposed to imply, on the one side, the transcendency
of God, and, on the other, the failure of the intelligible
universe to realise, and of our intelligence to under-
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 259
stand Him. Thus an imperfect consideration of the
relation of different aspects of the truth may seem to
drive us to the alternatives of mysticism or dualism.
It is the great achievement of Plato that he makes
us clearly see both horns of the dilemma, as it
is his failure that he is not able to discover any
quite satisfactory way of escape from it. Hence
he could not attain to that end after which he
was constantly striving, a complete reconciliation
of the opposite lines of thought which meet in his
philosophy. I think, however, that it will be evident
even from the sketch of his philosophical theology
I have given, that he did more than anyone before
or since to open up all the questions with which
the philosophy of religion has to deal.
LECTURE TENTH.
THE TRANSITION FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE.
The saying that “ every one is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian ” can be taken as true, if at all, only in a
very general sense. It can only mean that men are
roughly divided into two classes, those whose prevail-
ing tendency is toward synthesis and those whose
prevailing tendency is toward analysis; those who seek
to discover unity among things that present them-
selves as diverse and unconnected, and those who
seek rather to detect differences in things that present
themselves as similar or even identical. But it is
obvious that these two characteristics can never be
entirely isolated from each other. Distinction implies
relation, and relation distinction; and he who sees
clearly the one cannot be altogether blind to the
other. Least of all can we admit such blindness in
the case of two great systematic writers, like Plato
and Aristotle, who may be admitted to have a
certain bias of mind, but who cannot be conceived
FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 261
as one-sided dogmatists or men of one Idea. Aris-
totle’s philosophy, indeed, is not the contradictory,
but rather the opposite counterpart, of that of
Plato; and though the former may be disposed to
dwell with greater emphasis on the points that
separate him from his master than on those which
they hold in common, yet it may safely be asserted
that there are no two philosophers who are so closely
akin in the general scheme of their thought. Thus —
to name only the points that are of greatest import-
ance — they are in thorough agreement In maintaining
an idealistic or spiritualistic view of the ultimate
principle of thought and reality ; and they agree also
In holding that, in the world of our immediate ex-
perience, this principle realises itself under conditions
which are not in harmony with it, and which in
some degree disguise and obstruct the manifestation
of Its true nature. But, while they thus coincide
in the ultimate results of their philosophy, they
start from opposite points of view, and their general
agreement is apt to be hidden from us by continual
collisions on almost every secondary question.
We may, then, describe Aristotle’s general relation
to Plato in the following way : He is the most
faithful of Plato’s disciples, a disciple who developed
his master’s doctrine to a more distinct and definite
result, and who gave it a more systematic form ; and
he is, at the same time, the severest of Plato’s
262 THE TRANSITION FROM
critics, one who saw into all the weak places of his
teaching, and pressed home every objection against it
with unsparing logic. Sometimes he is carried so far
in his polemic that he becomes as one-sided as the
philosopher he attacks, only in an opposite direction.
At other times the antagonism between them is rather
one of words than of essential meaning, and we seem
to find the true interpretation of Plato rather in
Aristotle's own view than in that which he attributes
to his master. And not seldom he lays himself open
to the same objections which he urges against Plato.
The precise nature of this agreement and difference
may be made clearer by a few words of explanation.
As I have shown in previous lectures, the general
tendency of Plato is to generalise and to unify, to refer
each sphere of phenomenal existence to some idea
which he regards as the source of all its reality, and
the principle through which alone it can be understood;
and, ultimately, to carry back all these ideas to the
Good or the divine reason, as the principle of all being
and of all thought. His fundamental doctrine is that
‘ the universal is the real ’ ; and in his earlier dialogues
he emphasises this aspect of things so strongly as to
give colour to the idea that he seeks truth not in, but
beyond , the many. Hence the Platonic idea has been
supposed to be the abstract universal, i.e . a common
element found in the particulars as these are given in
ordinary experience, and not a principle which explains
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
263
these particulars, and in doing so transforms our first
conception of them. It has, however, been pointed
out in the preceding lectures that there is much
even in the earlier, and still more in the later
dialogues of Plato, to prove that he is no mystic
who loses the many in the one, and that, if he
regards his ideal principles as transcending the
particular phenomena of experience, yet this means —
mainly and primarily — that he sets aside all that is
irrelevant and accidental in the objects or aspects of
objects investigated, in order that he may confine his
view to their characteristic and inseparable properties.
It has also been pointed out that philosophy, as Plato
finally describes it, is as much concerned to resolve the
unity of the idea into the multiplicity of its different
elements or specific manifestations, as to bring back all
its differences to unity. His ultimate aim, therefore
is not simply to attain to unity, still less to do so by
the omission of difference, but to produce a com-
prehensive system of thought, in which all the
elements are clearly distinguished, yet all are organi-
cally connected with each other as members of one
whole.
On the other hand, it is obvious that Aristotle’s
primary tendency is to analyse and distinguish, to
resolve his data into their separate elements, and to fix
each element by clear definition in its opposition to all
the others ; and, generally, to account for the whole,
264 THE TRANSITION FROM
as far as possible, by the parts. He first drew sharp
lines of division between the different sciences, insist-
ing that each subject-matter should be dealt with
according to its own principle and method. For him,
‘the individual is the real/ and general ideas have
value only as the explanation of particulars. He
seeks the one not beyond, but in the many, not by
abstracting from experience, but by the analysis of it.
So far, therefore, his language seems to be in direct
contradiction to that of Plato, and, indeed, he means us
to understand that it is so. But when we look closer,
we find that he too is obliged to find room for the
Platonic point of view, and to confess that the one is
not only in but also beyond the many; 1 in other
words, that there are irrelevances and inconsistencies in
the immediate judgments of experience, from which we
must abstract in order to reach the real nature of its
objects ; and that science, therefore, cannot explain
the many changing particulars without rejecting
our first conceptions of them. For science, as
Aristotle conceives it, has to become demonstrative;
it has to deduce the properties of things from their
essential definitions ; and this implies that there is
much that is irrelevant and accidental in particular
substances, as immediately presented in experience,
which must be set aside as incapable of being
explained by the specific principles realised in them.
1 Post. An., II, 19.
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 265
Finally, if Aristotle seeks to explain things by
resolving them into their elements, yet he knows that
any real whole is more than the sum of its parts.
And, though he seems at first to take the separate
sciences and their objects as independent of each other,
yet in the end he represents the universe as a
teleological whole which finds its principle in the pure
nature of mind or self-consciousness, a principle which
is realising itself in every rational being and is
eternally realised in God.
The truth is that both the principles, expressed
in the propositions, ‘the universal is the real’ and
‘ the individual is the real,’ are ambiguous. Each of
them may be taken in a higher and in a lower sense ;
and while, in the lower sense, they are diametrically
opposed to each other, in the higher sense they are
only distinguished as complementary aspects of the
same truth. That ‘ the universal is the real ’ may,
as we have seen, be taken to mean that any common
quality, in the immediate conception of it, is an in-
dependent reality, centred in itself and without relation
to any other qualities or to any subject in which
they inhere ; and this is what is commonly under-
stood by the term realism. Or, on the other hand,
it may mean that anything that deserves to be called
a substance, or independent reality, must have in it a
principle of unity, which may at first be hidden from
us, but which, when we discover it, can be seen
266
THE TRANSITION FROM
to manifest itself in all the different aspects it
presents to us. Thus each kind of existence has
its specific form which makes it a relatively inde-
pendent whole, and, again, all these specific forms
are finally subordinated to one general form, which
gives unity and individuality to the universe. In like
manner, the principle that ‘the individual is the
real/ taken in its lowest sense, will mean that the
real lies in the particular thing as the immediate
object of sense perception, of which we can say only
that it is unique, or that it is a ‘this/ which here
and now we see and handle, and to which universals
must be attached as qualifying predicates. But, on
the other hand, it may mean that reality is to be
found only in that which has organic or, at least,
systematic completeness, in that which is one with
itself through all the difference of the elements that
enter into its constitution, and which remains one with
itself through all the phases of its history. In other
words, it may mean that that alone Is substantially
real which has a self, or something analogous to a
self, and which, therefore, in all its various modifi-
cations may be said to be at least relatively self-
determined.
Now, in the former of these two senses individuality
and universality are direct opposites of each other,
and to say that the real is both individual and uni-
versal, both a ‘ this 5 and an abstract quality, would
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
267
be absurd — though dialectically it might be shown
that abstract universality and abstract individuality
easily pass into each other. But, in the latter sense,
individuality and universality are different aspects of
the same thing ; for a universal only means a general
principle, viewed as expressing itself in different forms
or phases, each of which implies all the others and the
whole ; and an individual is just such a whole or
totality, viewed as determined in all its forms or
phases by one principle. To put it otherwise, we
know any thing or being, only when we discern all
the elements that are necessary to it in their dis-
tinction and in their relation; and we can recognise
it as a real whole or individual substance, only in so
far as these distinctions and relations are determined
by one idea or principle. In short, it is just the
determination of all its properties by one universal
principle that makes us separate it from other things
and beings as a true individual; and on the other hand,
if, and so far as, its character be determined by external
or accidental relations to other things, it is imperfectly
individualised. This, of course, implies that ultimately
there is no existence which is universal and none
which is individual in the highest sense of these words,
except the universe as a whole, or the divine Being
who is its principle. But it also implies that no
existence can have individuality even in a relative
sense, except in so far as it has universality, that is,
268 THE TRANSITION FROM
in so far as all its aspects are determined by one idea ;
and that no existence can have universality, unless it
is self-determined and individual . 1
Now, just in so far as the doctrines of Plato and
Aristotle can be taken in this latter sense, there is
no real opposition between them ; while, if they can
only be taken in the former sense, they must be
regarded as wholly irreconcileable. The truth may
perhaps best be expressed by saying that, to one who
takes their first words in their most obvious sense,
Plato and Aristotle seem respectively to begin with
the abstract universal and the abstract individual, but
that in their most developed doctrine they substitute
for these what we may call the concrete universal and
the concrete individual. This is partly hidden from
us by the fact that Aristotle seems often to take
Plato in his lowest sense, as many later writers have
taken Aristotle in his lowest sense. In his criticisms
upon the ideal theory Aristotle very distinctly points
out the error of taking the abstract universal as com-
plete in itself, and, therefore, as an independent or
individual substance. He shows with convincing logic
that the separate sciences of arithmetic, geometry, etc.,
in dealing with number, extension, quantity, motion, and
the like, are concerned with aspects of things which
1 Aristotle’s chief argument against the ideal theory is just that
the ideas were at once universal and individual. Of. e.g. Met.,
1086 , 10 .
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 269
may be isolated by abstraction, but which have no
independent reality apart from each other, or from the
concrete existence in which they are elements. 1 In
this he undoubtedly makes a valid criticism upon
Plato, in so far as the latter, especially in his earlier
works, is apt to speak of particular ideas or
universals, as if each of them were complete in itself
apart from the rest, and even to take the special
sciences built upon such principles as if they dealt
with quite independent realities or provinces of
reality. But Aristotle himself falls into the same
error, though in a less obvious way, when he treats
inorganic elements and organic beings — plants,
animals and men — as, each and all of them, in-
dividual substances in the same sense, without any
admission of the partial character of their individuality,
or of the fact that there are what Mr. Bradley calls
“ degrees of reality ” among them. Each of them may
be characterised as 'this particular thing"; and,
therefore, as Aristotle seems to think, each of them
may be taken as an independent substance which is
only accidentally related to other substances. It
ls true that he treats each of these substances as
having a specific principle realised in it, but he
draws a broad line of separation between the pro-
perties which belong to it in virtue of this specific
principle, and the accidents which come to it from
1 See especially Met., XIII, 3,
270
THE TRANSITION FROM
the peculiar character of its matter or from its
external relations to other things. Nor does he
seem to admit that there is any point of view from
which these accidents shall be conceived as them-
selves the manifestation of a higher necessity. In
other words, he does not realise that what, in view of
the principle realised in a particular substance, might
be regarded as accidental, may be necessary from the
point of view of some larger whole, in which it is
contained. Yet such isolation of the individual
involves exactly the same error as the Platonic
isolation of the universal.
And this leads me to point out what may be
regarded as the common source of the errors of the
Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophies. This is
that both Plato and Aristotle start with presupposi-
tions, which they are unable either to explain or
to explain away : Plato, with the presupposition
of a given multiplicity which he seeks to re-
duce to unity ; Aristotle, with the presupposition of
a confused unity or continuity 1 which he is never
able distinctly to resolve into its elements or to
show to be individually determined in all its parts.
The result is that, in both cases, that which is re-
garded as the ideal of knowledge, and, therefore, as
the supreme reality, cannot be recognised as the
truth or reality of the world of our immediate
1 Phys. ) 184a, 21.
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
211
experience. In that world, according to Plato, we
fail to find the pure manifestation of the universal
truth, which yet everything seems to suggest; and
when, in our practical endeavours, we seek to realise
that universal Good, which is ultimately the object
of all our desires, what we attain must always fall
short of what we think. In like manner, according
to Aristotle, what we require for our intellectual
satisfaction is demonstrative system ; it is to resolve
the world into a multitude of individual substances,
each of which is determined in all its properties by
one principle; but what we find is a multitude of
imperfect specimens of each specific kind, none of
which is free from accidental modifications. And,
again, in the sphere of practical reason we are met
by the same contradiction of the ideal and the actual ;
for, while it is the chief end of man to realise
himself as a rational being, to turn his life into a
perfectly ordered whole in which every activity plays
its proper part, he has to work out this ideal in
the contingent matter of an individual human exist-
ence, and under the influence of passions which can
never be entirely subjected to reason. Yet on the
other hand, that which in this world appears as the
ideal which man must seek to find or to produce
is, for both Plato and Aristotle, the supreme reality.
Por Plato, the Idea of Good is the unity of being
and knowing, it is the idea which sums up all other
272
THE TRANSITION FROM
ideas in itself, or it is the intelligence in which
all other intelligences are embraced : but, as such,
it is essentially separated from the finite world, and
from the psychical as well as the corporeal existence
of men. In like manner, the divine or absolute
Being is for Aristotle a pure self-deter min ed, self-
contemplating reason, which can be grasped only by
the pure intelligence of man, and can hardly be
distinguished therefrom. As such, God is the first
mover and the final end of the universe; yet, as we
shall see, Aristotle has great difficulty in connecting
him with the finite at all, and only succeeds in
doing so by a metaphysical tour de force . And, as
his conception of matter, as the necessary basis of
existence in this world of finitude and change, is
more positive than Plato’s, the ultimate result of
his system is even more decidedly dualistic than that
of his master.
This last point, however, is a subject of much
controversy, and in order to deal with it fairly, it
will be necessary to consider Aristotle’s main lines
of thought in two opposite aspects. I shall en-
deavour, therefore, to show that Aristotle goes much
beyond Plato in the fulness and definiteness with
which he works out his idealistic system; and yet
that, in doing so, he makes concessions to a dualistic
mode of thinking which are greater than anything
admitted by Plato.
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
273
The advance which Aristotle makes upon Plato
lies mainly in two directions. In the first place,
his individualistic tendency brings with it a greater
respect for immediate experience: it saves him to a
great extent from the dangers of a too rapid
synthesis, and it keeps alive his curiosity for all the
details of existence where no synthesis is yet pos-
sible. Aristotle is no mere empiricist ; he is well
aware that we must go beyond immediate experience
to know things as they really are ; but he has noth-
ing of that impatience with particular phenomena,
and that desire at once to get away from them to
general principles, which was the main weakness of
Plato. Plato had, indeed, to a certain extent, main-
tained the rights of opinion, that is, of our immediate
empirical consciousness, but Aristotle does much more.
He is infinitely patient in exhibiting all the aspects
of things as they present themselves to the or din ary
consciousness, and all the judgments which they have
suggested to the ‘ plain man/ as well as to the philo-
sopher. His collections of empirical data, especially
in biology, ethics, and polities, greatly widen the
area of scientific enquiry; and his constant effort to
mark out the different spheres of knowledge and to
find the principles appropriate to each sphere, ex-
hibits a great advance upon a method of philosophising
which brought all things at once within the scope
of its grand generalisations. The difficulty with
VOL. i. s
274 THE TRANSITION FROM
Aristotle is rather that each science or department
of philosophy is treated so independently, and with
so little reference to the others, that it is often
hard to see how the various researches can he com-
bined into one whole. But the dangers of excessive
specialism were yet in the future ; and, in the mean-
time, Aristotle’s example gave a great encouragement
to thoroughness and completeness of enquiry into
different departments of knowledge — an encouragement
which was much needed, but which was little appre-
ciated till a later period. .
To this formal improvement in the method of
science, another of even more importance has to be
added. Aristotle’s deep interest in the phenomena
of life — an interest which was probably awakened
in him prior to his entrance into the Platonic school,
and which in any case was quite independent of the
Platonic philosophy — not only introduced science into
a new field, but also suggested a new way of looking
at things in generaL The ideas of organism and de-
velopment, indeed, were not quite alien to Plato: they
were partly involved in his scheme of education
based as it is on the idea of the* latent rationality
of opinion which it is the object of all philosophical
teaching to bring to self-consciousness. He saw
clearly that the highest ideal for man is to become
what potentially he is, to develop the capacities which
are inherent in his nature. But Plato’s almost ex-
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 275
elusive occupation with the theoretical and practical
interests of men caused him to neglect the relations
between humanity and the lower forms of life, or,
so far as he paid regard to them, to interpret the
animal as a degraded and degenerated form of man.
His sharp distinction of soul, as that which is moved
by itself, from body, as that which is moved by
another — and which indeed he sometimes treats as
if it were a corpse — tended to obscure the unity of
the system of things, and the continuity of gradation
by which one stage of existence is linked on to
another. Hence all appearances of design in the pro-
ducts of nature were apt to be attributed to conscious
purpose rather than to the working of an immanent
teleological principle. On the other hand, Aristotle
recognises a purposive activity in all organised beings,
an activity which is independent of consciousness,
but which, in becoming conscious, does not essentially
change its character. There is thus a correspondence
or analogy running through all the steps of the
scala naturae, connecting the unconscious life of plants
with the relatively conscious life of animals, and the
self-conscious life of man. For, in each case, there
is an organising principle, which Aristotle calls the
soul. The Aristotelian idea of the soul is, indeed,
a new and original conception : for in Plato the soul
is not generally distinguished from the intelligence;
and, though, in the Tinmens , it appears as the principle
276
THE TRANSITION FROM
that combines the intelligence with the body, this
mediation is little more than a word, and shows
only that Plato felt the need of some connecting
link, which he was unable from the resources of his
philosophy to supply. Aristotle, on the other hand,
grasps the idea of organism, and declares the soul to
be the form which realises, or brings into activity
and actuality, the capacities of an organic body.
Hence in his view the soul cannot exist without
the body, nor the body without the soul. In short,
on the first aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy, and
subject to a reservation in favour of the reason,
soul and body seem to be taken by him as
different but essentially correlated aspects of the
life of one individual substance. Thus he rejects
the Platonic idea that all souls are simply minds in
various degrees of obscuration, owing to the nature of
the bodies in which they are incorporated; and with
it he repudiates the doctrine of transmigration, and,
especially the transmigration of the soul of a man into
the body of an animal. In place of this doctrine, he
substitutes the conception of a hierarchical order of
psychical existence, in which the higher soul includes
the lower, and reduces it into the basis or material
of its own new principle of life. But just because
of this — because, in Aristotle’s conception of it, the
higher life presupposes the lower and makes it the
means of its own realisation — Aristotle is able to
Plato to aristotle
277
regard the whole process as one, to personify nature
as a power that does nothing in vain, and even to
look upon the whole ascending movement of organic
being as an effort after the complete and self-deter-
mined existence which is found only in God. Each
of the finite creatures is thus regarded as seeking
for the divine, but able to realise it only within the
limits of its own form. Aiming at eternity, it is con-
fined within the conditions of an individual existence
which is finite and perishable, though it attains to
a kind of image of eternity in the continuity of the
species. It attains it, however, in a still higher way,
in so far as its own limited life is made the basis
of a higher life; 1 till in the ascending scale we reach
at last the rational life of man, who, at least in the
pure activity of contemplation, can directly participate
in the eternal and the divine.
So far the evolutionary conceptions of Aristotle
seem to carry us beyond many of the difficulties of
the Platonic theory, and to point towards a more
complete idealism than Plato had ever imagined.
Eor, if a philosopher be able to regard all nature as
the realisation of an immanent design, which becomes
more and more completely manifested the higher we
rise in the scale of being; if, further, he be able to
view the imperfect life of the lower orders of creat-
ures as subordinated to the fuller existence of those
which stand higher in that scale, it is natural to
278 THE TRANSITION FROM
expect that in the last resort he will be able to regard
all being as the manifestation or realisation of the
perfectly self-determined life of God. On this view
accident could exist only from the point of view of
the part, as separated from, and opposed to the
whole; it would be eliminated more and more as
we advance to the point of view of existences
which are relatively more complete, and it would
disappear altogether from the point of view of the
divine centre of the whole system. Matter, as
opposed to form, would become a relative concep-
tion, and the phenomenal world would simply be the
real world imperfectly understood. The organic view
of the universe would thus subordinate, and take
up into itself the mechanical; and in place of the
Platonic conception that reason “ persuades necessity
to work out that which is best in most things,” we
should be able to substitute the doctrine that all
things must, ultimately at least, be regarded as the
manifestations of a divine reason.
Such a view, however, we cannot attribute to
Aristotle. The organic idea, which he seems to
accept, especially in his conception of life in all its
forms, is continually traversed by another idea which
is essentially alien to it — the idea that all finite
existence is a combination of elements which are
not essentially related. Aristotle, in fact, while
accepting the Platonic opposition of form to matter,
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 279
gives to the latter a definite name, and a more dis-
tinct position than Plato had assigned to it. For in
the Republic Plato had spoken of it only as ‘Hot-Being,’
and had referred the defects of finite existence to
the fact that such existence stands midway between
Hot-Being and the substantial reality of the ideas.
And in the Timaeus he seemed still farther to lower
the character of phenomena by treating them as mere
images or reflexions of true Being, explaining the
appearance of substantial reality which they present
by the spatial conditions which attach to such
images. He seemed, therefore, to be endeavouring
to escape the admission of a genuine dualism, to
which nevertheless he was driven by what he calls a
‘spurious reasoning.’ Aristotle, on the other hand, looks
for a substratum for all change in something which
remains while its qualities are in process of being
altered. The change of properties is, he argues, impos-
sible, unless there be a substance which undergoes
this change ; and the genesis and decay of substances
is impossible, unless there is something which passes
from the one form of existence to the other. Hence,
as all forms of being are changeable, we are ulti-
mately driven by a necessary argument from analogy,
to conceive pure matter as the ultimate substratum of
all that movement or transitionary process to which
finite things as such are subjected. Matter is, there-
fore, the possibility of all things and the actuality of
280 THE TRANSITION FROM
nothing; an idea which is made to seem less irra-
tional by the doctrine that it never exists except
under some elementary form. Perhaps we may
better bring out the effect of Aristotle’s view by
saying — what Aristotle himself does not say — that
matter is that in the nature of finite things and
beings which causes their existence to be a continual
process of change, that is, causes it to be not a pure
activity which begins and ends in itself like that of
God, the unmoved mover, but a continual movement
from possibility to actuality, which comes to an
end in one subject only to begin in another in end-
less succession. Aristotle, indeed, avoids verbally the
contradiction of making matter, which in itself is
absolutely passive, the cause of the transitory cha-
racter of the existence that is realised in it ; but he
does so, as we shall see hereafter, only by taking
for granted the transition from the eternal to the
temporal, from the pure activity of the divine in-
telligence to the movement and change of the phe-
nomenal world. Yet this is the very thing which
needs to be explained.
This general antagonism or imperfect union of
matter and form shows itself even in Aristotle’s
conception of the organic process. At times, as we
have seen, he emphasises the unity of form and
matter, and therefore of soul and body, so strongly as
to make them essentially correlative with each other
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
281
— opposite but complementary aspects of the same
being, which are only separated by abstraction. Thus
when he declares that the ultimate matter of a
substance is one and the same with its form, though
the one is to be taken as expressing the potentiality
of which the other is the actuality , 1 he suggests the
conception of a unity which is beyond the difference
of the two elements, and in which, therefore, they
entirely lose their independent character. So far as
this is the case, it would be true to say, as Aris-
totle does say in the immediate context, that no
reason can be given for the unity of form and matter,
except that they are reciprocally form and matter
to each other. From such a point of view we could
not speak of form acting upon matter, or matter
reacting upon form, but only of the whole substance
as manifesting itself in these two aspects. But
Aristotle does not consistently think of it in this
way. For the most part he seems rather to regard
the form as giving to the matter a unity which does
not belong to it, and to which it is never completely
subordinated. Thus he declares that the soul neither
grows nor decays, though all the activities usually
ascribed to it are conditioned by the growth and
decay of the body. The soul, in fact, is taken as
an identity which abides in unity with itself above
all change ; and which, though it gives rise to manifold
'Met., 10456 , 18 .
282 THE TRANSITION FROM
activities and changes in the individual subject,
never itself enters into the process. While, there-
fore, we can see that Aristotle is striving against
the tendency to separate soul and body, yet his way
of expressing the difference between them inevitably
leads him back to the Platonic conception of a
spiritual being which is dragged down into a lower
region, and reduced to an imperfect kind of activity by
the vehicle which it has to use. This tendency to
fall from the conception of an organism to that of a
orvvQerov — a complex existence compounded of a
mortal body and a spiritual principle which finds an
inadequate expression therein — is shown even in his
account of the animal life; as when he tells us
that the decay of age does not affect the soul, but
only the organs through which it acts, and that,
therefore, “if the old man had the young man’s
eyes, he would see as well as the young man.”
Here the soul is manifestly taken as an abstract
form which is not relative to the body; not as a
unity which maintains itself in change, but as one
which is entirely lifted above change and unaffected
by it.
The difficulty, however, takes a more definite form
in relation to the reason of man, which, in Aristotle’s
own words, “seems to be born in ns as an inde-
pendent substance, which is beyond decay and death.” 1
1 De An., 4086 , 19 .
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE
283
In this case the question is not merely of the
presence or absence of a special bodily organ ; for
reason, according to Aristotle, has no such organ.
Yet its existence in the body and its connexion
with the animal nature, subjects it to conditions
which alter its pure activity, and bring it down
from the intuitive contemplation of truth to the
sphere of imagination and of discursive thought.
Hence Aristotle says that “ the discursive reason
and the feelings of love and hate are not modes or
affections of reason, but of the subject in which it
is realised, though they are due to that realisation.
Hence, when this subject is destroyed, reason ceases
to remember and to love ; for such states belong not
to it, but to the being in whom soul and body are
combined (tov kolvov ), and this, of course, perishes.
But reason in itself is something more divine and
cannot be the subject of any such modes as these.” 1
It would appear, then, that Aristotle holds that
the individual mind, as such, i.e. the individuals con-
sciousness of his own past and of all the particulars
of his individual life, with all the desires and feelings
which accompany such a consciousness, is changeable
and mortal. In this region of the finite, reason sinks
from intuition and contemplation into "discourse of
reason ’ ; in other words, it no longer sees all things
in their transparent unity, but, aided by sensuous
1 De An ., 4086 , 25 seq.
284
THE TRANSITION PROM
images, its thought moves from one object to another,
distinguishing and connecting the different elements
by definite acts of analysis and synthesis, of judg-
ment and inference. Thus a deep line of division
is drawn between the intuitive and the discursive
intelligence, between the pure reason and the passions
and interests of mortal life. And the organic idea,
which is already strained to the utmost by Aristotle
in his conception of the relations between the form
and the matter, and, therefore, between the soul and
body of plants and animals, is once for all set aside
as regards the rational life of man.
The result, then, is that, though at first Aristotle
seems to free himself from the dualism of J?lato, and
to rise to an organic point of view, he is unable in
the long run to maintain this advantage. It was a
distinct advance upon Plato to repudiate the mystic
tendency shown in some parts of the Platonic
writings, the tendency to regard the connexion of
soul and body as accidental or external. It was a
still farther advance to maintain that matter was
not merely the ‘ Hot-Being * of the Republic , or the
spatial conditions which, according to the Timaeus ,
distinguish images or appearances from reality, but
the necessary correlate of form. But Aristotle was
not able to maintain himself at this point of view,
or to work it out to all its consequences. Hence
the very fact that he gave a distinctly positive
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 285
character to matter as the substratum of motion
and change, while yet he was unable to conceive
it as simply the manifestation or necessary com-
plement of the ideal principle, drives him in the
end to a more definitely dualistic result than had
been reached by Plato. It also causes him to neglect
or reject those speculations in which Plato comes
nearest to a concrete, as opposed to an abstract
idealism. Thus, in the end, as we shall see more
fully hereafter, Aristotle comes to a view of reason,
and of God as the unmoved mover, which carries
us far in the direction of the mysticism of Plotinus.
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OE REASON IN ITS
PRACTICAL USE.
In the last lecture I gave a general view of Aristotle’s
way of t hin king as contrasted with that of Plato.
I pointed out that he makes a great advance upon
Plato in so far as he frees himself from the tendency
to oppose form to matter and soul to body, and
thereby initiates a more organic view of the world,
and, in particular, of the phenomena of life in all
its forms — vegetable, animal and human. But just
because he is not able to carry out this new way
of thinking to its consequences, in the end he becomes
the author of a more definite and pronounced form
of dualism than that of Plato. For, though in his
philosophy matter gets a more definite position, it is
not after all made the true correlate of form. Hence
it sinks into an external something which the form
needs in order to realise itself, but in which it
can only realise itself imperfectly. And even this
necessity seems to be denied in the case of the
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON 287
pure intelligence, which is conceived as so complete
in itself, that its association with the body is not
required for its realisation, but rather, through such
association, it is drawn down into a lower kind of
activity. It is this view of reason which is the
source of the greatest difficulty in Aristotle’s psycho-
logy ; it manifests itself again in his conception of
morality and of the relation of the practical to the
contemplative life ; and, finally, it determines his idea
of the nature of God and of his relations to the
world.
This will become more completely understood if
we follow the line of the ascent to man, which
Aristotle traces out for us in the De Anima.
He begins by telling us that there is no
proper definition of the soul, if a definition be
understood to mean the determination of a generic
form which remains identical with itself in all its
specific manifestations . 1 When we speak of organic
beings as having souls, all we mean is that in
each of them there is an immanent principle of
unity. But this principle takes a different character
in all the species that fall under it ; for these species
are not co-ordinate. On the contrary, they form a
series, in which each later member takes up the
previous member into itself, but at the same time
so transforms it that there is nothing which is
1 J)e Anima , 4146, 20 seq.
288 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
common to them all. It might, indeed, be said
that what is possessed by the lowest kind of soul
is common also to all the higher kinds : but this
is not strictly true ; for in the higher soul, the
lower ceases to be what it was, as it is made sub-
ordinate to a different principle of unity, and its
own characteristics are thereby completely changed.
Thus the life of sensation which is characteristic of
animals is not simply added to the nutritive life
of plants; it so absorbs and transfigures it, that,
though all the elements of the latter are present in
the former, none of them is just what it was in
the former. And the same is the case when we
pass from the sensitive life of animals to the rational
life of men. In the transition to a higher stage of
development, the elements of the lower stage are
preserved, but they are, in the language of Aristotle,
reduced to potentiality ; they are absorbed and taken
up into a new form of being. The individuality of
the more imperfect form of existence disappears, as
it becomes the material or basis for a new principium
indimduationis . Hence the different species are con-
nected only by a certain bond of analogy, in so far
as the relations of form and matter are the same
in all.
To begin at the beginning, the life of plants is
a life of nutrition and reproduction, in which the
individual assimilates material constituents from its
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE
289
environment to subserve its own existence and thus
goes through a course of growth and development,
which in the end passes into decay and death.
So long as this series of changes goes on, the
individual unity of the plant maintains itself, and
reproduction is only a farther extension of the same
process whereby a specific form is realised in a
new individual which must go through the same
cycle of change. Eor, as Aristotle says, adopting
the language of Plato, “it is the most natural of
all functions for the living being to produce another
like itself, the plant a plant, the animal an animal,
in order that they may partake in the eternal,
so far as is possible for them. This is what all
beings seek for, and in view of this they do all
that it is natural for them to do. We must, how-
ever, distinguish between the objective end which
they all seek and the realisation of it which is
possible to the particular subject. Now, since living
beings cannot partake in the divine and the eternal
by continuing their individual existence — it being
impossible for a nature which is finite and perishable
to maintain for ever its individuality and numerical
identity — they partake in it as they can. In other
words, they abide, not in themselves, but in what
is like them; not as numerically one, but in the
unity of one species ” 1 What we have in the plant
1 De Anima , 414a, 26:
T
VOL. I.
290 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
life is, therefore, not merely a continuation of the
process of change, whereby the different inorganic
elements are incessantly passing into each other ;
for these elements and their process are subordinated
to a higher principle of unity, first in the individual,
and then, when the individual fails, in the race.
Tims by the continuous cyclical movement of indi-
vidual and racial life the transitory existence of
finite beings is turned, in Platonic language, into a
moving image of eternity.
Again, just as the nutritive life is not a mere
repetition of the process of the elements, nor even
that with the addition of another process, but in-
volves the subjection of these elements to a higher
principle of unity, so the sensitive and appetitive life
of animals is not an external addition to the nutri-
tive and reproductive process, but absorbs and, so
to speak, transubstantiates its results. In one sense
it might be said that the animal goes through the
same round of existence as the plant, and that the
ends realised in it are still the same, the maintenance
of the individual and of his kind. But this is only
superficially true : for these very ends become changed
in character when they are mediated by conscious-
ness, by sensation and desire. It is true, indeed,
that these ends do not exist in their generality for
the animal itself, any more than for the plant, and
therefore the animal cannot be said to will them,
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 291
It is only of nature, as an unconscious principle,
which realises itself in them through their particular
sensations and appetites, that Aristotle speaks as
willing the good of the individual and of his kind.
But the animal is capable of perceiving the particular
objects that secure or hinder its well-being, and of
feeling desire or aversion in relation to them. For
the sensitive soul stands in an ideal relation to its
objects, and can receive their sensible forms without
the matter. Moreover, these sensible forms are not
impressed on its organs from without, but the object
without only calls into action what is potentially
present in the sensitive faculty. Hence sense can-
not perceive anything but its special object, and even
that only within the limits of its sensibility. From
this point of view its perceptions are merely a
development of its own nature, and it might fairly
be said to perceive nothing but itself. 1 We have
further to observe that all sensations, in order that
they may be compared and distinguished from each
other, must be brought to a centre of sensibility in
what we should call the feeling self. 2 And the same
must of course be true of the desiring self, though
Aristotle does not call special attention to this.
In both these forms of life, as I have already
observed, the idea of the organic correlation of body
and soul conflicts with Aristotle’s general conception
1 Z>e Anima, 417a, 21, *JDe An. 3 426£>, 8,
292 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
of the relation of foim to matter, which is deter-
mined by form, yet not altogether subjected to it:
for matter is always regarded as having a relative
independence. Thus the material constituents of the
body have a process of their own which is never
completely subordinated to the process of plant life,
and which in the decay and death of the plant
ceases to be subordinated to it at all. And, in like
manner, the nutritive life has a process of its own
which is not unconditionally subordinated to the pro-
cess of animal existence, or completely absorbed in
it. But the discordance between these two aspects
of the relation of form and matter becomes still
more definitely and distinctly revealed in Aristotle's
conception of the life of man. The form of man's
life is reason ; and reason is not merely one form
among others, it is the universal form, the form which
embraces and prevails over all other forms. And
reason has, as Aristotle puts it, no opposite, nothing
from which it is distinguished or to which it is
externally related; if it is determined, it is only
as it determines itself. If, therefore, reason be
taken as the form of the life of any being, it
would seem that that life must not only be a stage
higher in development than the life of animals; it
must be qualitatively distinguished from it. For
there can be no continuity between the relative and
the absolute, between that which acts only as it is
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 293
determined by something else and that which deter-
mines itself. In fact, it seems something like a
paradox that such a principle should manifest itself
in the form of any particular existence. Yet this
paradox, after all, is not one that arises out of the
peculiar doctrines of Aristotle. It is the essential
paradox or problem of the life of man, as a being
who is, in one point of view, only a particular
existence like an animal or a plant, but who, never-
theless, has the principle of universality, the principle
of self-consciousness and self-determination within
him. It is, therefore, by no subtilty of ancient
dialectic, but by the nature of the case, that Aristotle
is forced to recognise two contrasted aspects of the
nature of man, as at once particular and universal,
or, we might even say, finite and infinite. How
does he endeavour to solve this problem ?
It must, I think, be confessed that Aristotle has
no final solution for this difficulty, but rather that
he evades it, as the Scholastics so often evaded their
difficulties, by a distinction. In other words, he
breaks the unity of man's life and divides it into
two departments or spheres of existence, in either
of which he may live and move. In both spheres,
indeed, man manifests his rational nature ; for reason
is the form of his being, and it is impossible to live
the life of a man without, in some sense, living the
life of reason. But there is an exercise of reason
294 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
in which it is determined by itself, and deals only
with purely intelligible objects ; and there is another
exercise of reason in which it deals with a material
which is alien to itself — a material which it can
control and subordinate to its own ends, but which
it can never completely assimilate. Thus in relation
to the immediate world of experience reason may be
regarded as both immanent and transcendent. But it
is only as transcendent that it can fully realise itself
and come to a clear consciousness of its own nature ;
while, as immanent, it is obstructed by the nature
of the subject-matter with which it has to deal,
and drawn down into a lower form of activity in
which it can never adequately manifest or satisfy
itself. Speaking generally, these two spheres corre-
spond to the theoretical and the practical use of
reason ; for, in its theoretical use, reason is concerned
only to discover the universal principles which
underlie all existence, and to follow them out to
their logical consequences; its work, therefore, is
purely scientific, and the results it reaches will be
necessary and exact. In its practical use, on
the other hand, it has to deal with the world of
immediate experience, as well as with the nature
of man, in all their complexity and particularity:
it has to determine the ends which, as a rational
being who is also an animal, he has to realise, and
to consider the means of realising them in the world.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 295
In this sphere, therefore, its objects are practical
rather than scientific; and if, by leflexion, it can
attain to a kind of science, yet the results of such
science must be only approximate and inexact — they
can reach only generality and not universality. We
have, then, a broad division between the two spheres
of theory and practice ; and, in accordance with this
division, we have to distinguish between pure science,
which has to do with intelligible reality, as such — with
the ideal forms of things and their consequences — and
that lower kind of science which seeks to throw light
upon the particulars of experience that have to be
dealt with in practice. In the sequel we may have
to admit some modification of this contrast, and that,
indeed, on both sides ; for Aristotle’s actual methods
of theoretical and practical science do not strictly
correspond to the sharp distinction which he draws
between them; but it will conduce to clearness to
begin by taking the division in its most rigid form.
We have, therefore, first of all, to realise that
Aristotle conceives the life of man as consisting in
the exercise of reason, and as comprising two dis-
tinct forms of that exercise, Qeoapla and the
pure activity of contemplation, and the mixed and
imperfect activity of the practical life. And we
have further to realise that this division is not quite
exclusive: for contemplation or science enters into prac-
tice, though only as a means to an end beyond itself.
296 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
This broad division of the contemplative from the
practical life is one of the points in which Aristotle
separates himself decisively from Plato, though only
by giving further play to tendencies which are
already visible in the Platonic writings. For Plato’s
philosophy, like that of his master Socrates, was, in
the first instance, practical, and it was only by gradual
and almost unwilling steps that he came to make
theory an end in itself apart from practice. And,
even when he did so, he was never content to make
theory his sole end, but to the last sought to bring
the highest ideas of his speculation to bear upon the
reformation of Greek political life. The Republic ,
however, shows the parting of the ways. It shows
us how Plato, in the very effort to render his prac-
tical proposals complete and to base them upon the
highest philosophical principles, was gradually led to
invert the relations of theory and practice, and to
treat the latter as a secondary result of the former.
Thus in the first part of the Republic Plato starts
from the actual life of a Greek State, and seems
tacitly to assume, what Aristotle declared in so many
words, that such a State is the i repag rrjs avrapicela ? —
the precise form of social organisation in which the
moral nature of man can find its best education
and realisation. And if he seeks to improve upon
the actual models of political life set before him in
Athens or Sparta, it is not by introducing another
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 297
political idea, but rather by working out more fully
the principles that seemed to underlie these models.
Thus his socialism and communism were only the
further development of that tendency to lose the
man in the citizen which had already been carried so
far in the actual life of Greece.
But the very attempt to universalise the principle
of Greek politics inevitably led Plato to aim at
something more than it was possible to realise in a
Greek municipal society. The philosopher, he main-
tained, must rule ; and the philosopher was one who
looked beyond the unity of the State to the unity of
the whole universe, and who could not, therefore,
treat the former as an absolute end. The Idea of
Good, the principle of all being and of all knowing,
must be made the basis and the object of his life;
and the State, with its bourgeoise ethics of use and
wont and its mythological religion, could not be
recognised by him as more than a subordinate sphere
of reality. If, therefore, the philosopher has laid upon
him the duty of governing and regulating the State,
yet his true life is elsewhere. His function as ruler,
indeed, is to make the civic community a copy
of the ideal order of the intelligible world ; but
his main interest lies in the original and not in the
copy. Ethics and politics have for him become
secondary to philosophy or theology, and the practical
has been subordinated to the contemplative life.
298 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
And soon, the question must arise whether the con-
nexion of the two can be maintained, and whether the
municipal State can be brought in relation to the type
set up for it, or reconstituted upon the model of the
intelligible world. The last word of the Republic on
this subject shows that Plato found it hard to pour
the new wine into the old bottles. “ I conclude , 9 says
Socrates, “ that the man of understanding will direct
all his energies throughout life to those studies which
will impress upon the soul the characters of wisdom,
temperance, and justice, and will neglect all others.”
... “ Then,” answers Glaucon, “ if that be his
motive, he will not care to interfere with politics.”
“ By the dog of Egypt, you are wrong,” replies Socrates ;
“for he certainly will do so, at least in his own city,
though perhaps not in the city in which he happens
to be born.” “ I understand,” says Glaucon ; “ you
mean that he will be an active politician in the city
which we have now organised, the city which as yet
exists merely in idea ; for, I believe, it is not to be
found anywhere on earth.” “Well,” answers Socrates
again, “ perhaps in heaven there is laid up a pattern
for him who wishes to behold it, and, beholding, to
organise his own life by its laws. But the question of
its present or future existence upon earth is quite un-
important; for, in any case, the philosopher will live
after the laws of that city only and not of any other.” 1
1 Rep., 592 a.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 299
What we gather from this remarkable utterance is
that Plato found it impossible to raise the Greek
State, which still remained for him the highest type of
political association, to the level of his philosophical
principles. In fact, he makes no attempt to connect
the reconstruction of the State with the Idea of Good,
and the only place in which he gives a practical turn
to his highest ideas is in the remarkable picture of the
philosopher which he draws at the beginning of the
Republic. There he endeavours to show that one who
views all particular things in the light of the whole, as
the philosopher must do, will necessarily acquire an
absolute generosity and freedom of spirit, which will
raise him far above the level of the ordinary civic
virtues ; 1 but Plato does not enquire how, in that
case, his philosophy can throw any light upon the
organisation of the State. Rather, as Plato seems to
indicate, his contemplation of ideal reality must bring
with it a depreciatory estimate of all political interests,
and even of the finite life in general. “Do you
think/’ says Socrates, “ that a spirit full of such lofty
thoughts, and privileged to contemplate all time and
existence, can possibly attach any great importance
to this life of ours ? ” 2 And, in another place, he
anticipates Aristotle in drawing a broad line of
1 Cf. Rep., 491 b, where these virtues are asserted to be a hindrance
to philosophy.
2 Rep., 486 A.
300 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
division between the ethical virtues — which “ are like
qualities of the body, which, not being in us at first,
are put into us by training and habit” 1 — and the
wisdom of the philosophers, which is based on the
pure faculty of intelligence and requires nothing for
its development, except to be turned from sensible
things to the contemplation of ideal reality. On
this view, however, the relation of the philosopher
to the State seems to drop away from him, or to
become an external adjunct to his life, which can be
easily disjoined from it altogether. He owes it as a
duty to the city that has educated him that he should
be willing to undertake its government, but his real
vocation lies not in any practical endeavours, but in
the contemplation of the ideal and the divine.
When the link between theory and practice had
become so weak, it was easily broken by Aristotle,
who summarily rejects the idea of connecting ethics
and politics with the highest principle of philosophy.
Accordingly, in the Ethics he sets aside the Platonic
Idea of Good — ostensibly, indeed, on the ground that
it is an abstraction which has no definite meaning, or
which at least is too vague and general to supply any
practical guide to human life. But Aristotle’s quarrel
was not merely with the ideal theory of Plato, but
with his whole attempt to connect ethics with meta-
physics, and to base the regulation of conduct upoD
1 Rep., 518 e.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE
801
the conception of the absolute Gooch While, therefore,
Plato, in the effort to reach the deepest and most
comprehensive view of ethics, had been drawn onward
from the consideration of the unity of the State to
that of the unity of the whole system of the universe,
Aristotle entirely repudiates this line of thought as
carrying us beyond the limits of the matter in hand,
and demands that ethics and politics should be treated
as a separate science, and saved from the irrelevant
intrusion of metaphysics. And his ultimate reason for
this w T as not that he denied the existence of an
absolute Good, which it is possible for us to know ;
for, as we shall see, his own metaphysical investigations
were directed to the discovery of such a Good. It lay
rather in his conviction that our relation to that Good
cannot be practical but only theoretical; while the
sphere of ethics, on the other hand, is not theory but
practice. Theory, therefore, can be of use only so far
as it is a means to practice; for “we study ethics not
that we may know what virtue is, but that we may
become good men ; otherwise there could be no ad-
vantage in it whatsoever It is true, indeed, that
ethics starts with the conception of man as a rational
subject who seeks to organise his life with a view to the
end which, relatively to him, is the highest ; and no
doubt also, what is highest relatively to man’s nature
is the exercise of his reason : but in the ethical sphere
'Mh., 1003ft, 27.
302 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
this does not mean the exercise of pure reason upon its
appropriate objects. It means, looking at the matter
in a subjective point of view, the exercise of reason in
governing the passions and giving unify and order to
the inner life of man as a complex being, who is a
compound of f dust and deity ’ : for he who speaks of
man, as Aristotle says, n rpocrTLOrjo'i kgli Orjplov: 1 that is, he
must take into account the lower as well as the higher
nature of man. And, looking at it in an objective
point of view, it means the control of the conditions
presented by the environment of the life of man. so as
to gain opportunity for the exercise of his highest
qualities. In both aspects, ethics has to guide man in
dealing with the particular facts of his existence, and
it has, therefore, to take account of external conditions
and, therefore, of an element of contingency which
cannot be brought within the sphere of pure reason.
And this also greatly affects the value of science in
relation to morality ; for, w T hile reason can rise above
the particular experiences of the moral and social
life to the general conception of the end to be sought,
and of the means whereby it may be attained, it is
hampered in its processes both of induction and
deduction by conditions which do not apply to pure
science. In the first place, ethical experience is not
the product of reflexion, but of the unconscious action
of reason in the development of social life ; and, we
1 PoL } 1287 a, 30.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE
303
may add, it must have been already acquired by
the individual himself, who seeks to interpret it,
or even to understand its interpretation when it is
presented by others. For, only one who by par-
ticipation in the common life of the State has had
his moral nature developed, is capable of rising to
the knowledge of ethical principles or even of making
anything of them when they are set before him by
others. The value of scientific ethics is, therefore,
that it brings into clear consciousness the ideas which
underlie the unreasoned ethics of the ordinary good
man and good citizen; and he who w r ould recognise
the truth of ethical science or gain any profit from
it, must already possess in himself the data on
which it is based. It is true that for such an
one ethical science may have great value; for the
reflexion which discovers the universal principles
involved in the special rules and customs of life
will enable him to criticise and correct the very
experience from which he starts. The statesman,
above all — who has not merely to find his way amid
the difficulties of private life, but to meet the
larger demands of legislation and administration, and
even, it may be, to make modifications in the con-
stitution of the community which he governs — must
know the grounds upon which the State in general,
and his particular form of State, are based. He must
have analysed the moral nature of man, and examined
304 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
the particular excellences that need to be called
forth, and the particular vices which need to be
repressed, by a good education. But even in his
case Aristotle insists on the necessity of that
immediate sense or intuition of moral truth, which
can only be developed by habit. Moral science, there-
fore, must not only be based upon the immediate
judgments of the individual who is imbued with the
ethical spirit of a civic society, but it depends for
the proper application of its general principles upon
the peculiar tact and power of handling ethical
interests which is due to that spirit.
Now no one can fail to recognise that, in his account
of the development of the moral consciousness through
habit and in his rejection of the Socratic doctrine
that 'virtue is knowledge, 5 Aristotle is expressing an
important aspect of the truth — if at least we limit
knowledge to the reflective form of science. It is
easy to show that the science of ethics presupposes the
existence of morality, and cannot be the cause of
that existence. If all the spiritual possessions of
man, and, in particular, the institutions and customs
of the society of which he is a member, be produced
by the activity of the reason that is within him,
yet they are certainly not due to a reason that is
conscious of what it is doing, or aware of its own
processes. So far, therefore, even the profoundest
believer in the rational nature of man would admit
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 305
that the unconscious conies before the conscious, or,
what is the same thing, that the particular applica-
tion of moral principles is prior to their distinct
recognition as general principles. To say otherwise
would be like saying that no one could trace effects
to causes without having recognised and defined the
idea of causality.
But, in the second place, Aristotle means more
than this. He means that in the determination of
particular objects by the ordinary consciousness there
is a synthesis of reason with an irrational element —
with an element of real contingency of which we can
only say that it exists, and that we cannot explain
it by any rational principle. Hence, strictly speak-
ing, we cannot know the particular; we can only
grasp it in the immediate intuition of sense; or,
to put it in a more directly Aristotelian way, our
knowledge of objects becomes actual, and not merely
potential, only when the consciousness of the universal
is brought into relation with the perceptions of sense . 1
There is, therefore, an element in our consciousness
which cannot be universalised, or made intelligible,
in the way of science. This fact, however, does not
embarrass us in the sphere of pure science; for, in
Aristotle’s view of it, science has only to do with
general principles and what can be deduced from
them. In the practical life, however, it becomes
1 Met., 103Ga, 5: cf. 1087a. 17.
u
VOL. I,
•306 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
highly important, for action has directly to do with
the particular — with the particular act to be done
and the particular end to be achieved. And this
can be apprehended only in an immediate intuition,
which might be called a moral sense, if that name
did not do injustice to the rational element involved
in it . 1 This moral sense cannot be produced in us
by teaching or by any purely intellectual process;
it is due only to that combination of the rational
with the irrational factor, which belongs to our nature
as thinking beings who are also animals; and if it
can be developed by training, and especially by the
training of social life, yet the process of such training
cannot be referred to reason alone. In other words,
our appetites and passions have not reason immanent
in them, and must have it superinduced upon them
from without by exercise and habituation. They
have in themselves no measure, they fluctuate between
excess and defect, and only accidentally hit the
golden mean. Hence, measure has to be imposed
upon them by reason, and gradually to be wrought
into their texture by discipline. It is as with the
sculptor, who has to give form to a material which in
itself is formless, or has only a form which is not
relative to his purpose, and who, therefore, in shaping
the parts of his statue, has so to guide his hand that
each of them may he in just proportion to all the rest.
1 fflh,, 1142a, 25.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 307
In the creation of such a work of art, the exact
measure of each part has to be preserved, and the
slightest exaggeration or diminution of any limb or
feature may make all the difference between beauty
and ugliness. So also it is with the moral artist, who
has to take the rough block of humanity, with the
animal nature which is its basis, and so to restrain or
to encourage, to weaken or to strengthen, the different
passions and tendencies, as to fashion out of them
a noble character. Nor does it alter the case that
each man, to a certain extent at least, is the moral
artist of himself. Here, too, the material is given
independently of the reason either of the individual
himself or of those who regulate the life of the
society in which he is a member; and the manifold
contingency to which that material is subjected, makes
it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to attain a
satisfactory result. All we can say is that goodness
is shown in making the best of the circumstances.
We can now see what it is that makes Aristotle
dwell so persistently upon the inexactness of the
science of ethics. It is not merely that the subject
is so complex that it is impossible to disentangle
all the threads that are interwoven in it. Nor is
it, as has been suggested, that Aristotle mistakes
the difficulties of the practice of science for the
difficulties of the science of practice; for, though
the application of any science must involve many
308 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
considerations which are omitted in pure theory,
that does not interfere with the exactness of the
science itself. The real reason is that, in Aristotle’s
way of conceiving it, the science of practice has little
or no value apart from practice, because of the
essential nature of its subject-matter. It is that
the actions of men involve a realisation of reason in
an element which is not purely rational. Hence, from
the pure idea of man as a rational being, we cannot
develop an adequate conception of the methods in
which reason is to he realised in human life. We
are obliged to take the actual types of morality as
they present themselves in experience, and from
them to extract such general ideas as may give
some help to the citizen and the statesman in mould-
ing their own character and the character of others.
And even in this case the teachings of science will
he unavailing, unless such citizen or statesman is
already deeply imbued with the spirit of the State.
Thus (ppovrjaris can never become crocpla , practical
wisdom can never be raised into the form of pure
science. Accordingly, in his ethical and political
philosophy, Aristotle clings very closely to the facts
of Hellenic character and Hellenic institutions,
and his ideal of the State is little more than
a selection and combination of the features which
present themselves in different Greek cities. It
is an ideal Athens, with the mob of mechanics, and
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 309
all that are incapable of the highest civic functions,
shut out from authority ; or it is an ideal Sparta
with its admirable discipline directed to higher ends
than war. But Aristotle never pretends, like Plato,
directly to connect the ethical and political life with
the highest exercise of the intelligence: indeed, he
tells us explicitly that that life belongs to man as
a cnuvQerov — a complex or compound being with a
mortal as well as an immortal part. Hence he
speaks contemptuously of the notion of ascribing
moral virtues to the gods, who, as purely spiritual
beings, cannot descend into the region of practice.
“ That perfect happiness is,” he declares, “ a purely
contemplative activity, may be seen from this that
we ascribe it most of all to the gods. But what
kinds of moral action are we to attribute to them?
Are we to say that they do just actions ? As if it
were not absurd to think of the gods as making
bargains with each other and duly restoring what
is entrusted to them, and the like. Or are we to
say that they perform acts of bravery, enduring
dangers and encountering risks because it is noble
so to do ? Or, again, have they to show liberality in
their dealings ? But to whom will they give any-
thing, and what is the coin or currency that they
use? Or are they to be thought of as temperate?
Would it not be a quaint praise of the gods to say
that they have no bad impulses to check ? In
310 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
truth, when we go through all the moral virtues, we
see clearly that such practical activities are mean
and unworthy of the gods .” 1
Whether the same objections will not lie against
all the theoretic activities by which the intelligence
of a finite being advances to the discovery of the
truth, and, indeed, against every exercise of the intellect
short of the beatific vision, Aristotle does not here
enquire. But the consequence for ethical science is
obvious. The ethical teacher must not attempt to
pass beyond the boundaries of ethical experience, or
to connect his science with metaphysical principles.
He must be content to bring to light the principles
that underlie Greek ethical practice, and to use them
to improve that practice. In this lies at once the
value of ethical studies, if confined within their proper
range, and their valuelessness, if carried beyond it.
Aristotle, therefore, frequently insists on the useless-
ness of ethical theories that are not based upon an
actually realised ethical life, and do not throw new
light upon it. Morals, in his view of it, is essentially
a science that springs from practice and returns to
practice; and for it to set up any other end than
this, or to pretend to be science for science’s sake,
is to forfeit all its claims to the relative place which
it holds in human knowledge. It is only pure Oewpla,
pure contemplation, that can pass beyond these limi-
1 Eth, J 11786, 7
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 311
tations, can leave behind it the uncertain and troubled
region of the contingent, in which lie the interests
and cares of man’s transitory life, and can attain to
that kind of reality which is independent of time
and change.
Nor is there any possibility of connecting the rela-
tive truths of ethics with the absolute principles of
pure metaphysic. There is, indeed, a kind of connexion
between the practical and the theoretical life, in so
far as the former is the precondition of the latter:
but this is only an external and accidental connexion.
The State is needed to protect and to educate man,
to furnish the material basis for his existence and
the sphere for the exercise of his moral energies.
It is, so to speak, the ladder on which he has to
climb up to the higher life. But with that which is
highest of all, it has nothing directly to do. The
contemplative life, and it alone, is self-sufficient and
complete in itself; or it would be so for us men
were it not that, as mortal and changeable beings,
we cannot continuously maintain the pure activity
of thought, and must therefore fall back on the
ethical virtues, which “ enable us to play our parts
as men /’ 1 In showing the elevation of the contem-
plative life above all material and even moral
interests, Aristotle’s sober style for once gets a tinge
of poetry. “ Such a life,” he declares, “ is greater than
1 irpbs rb avOpaireteaBai. Eth., 117S6, 7-
312 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
can be measured by a human standard, and man can
live it not qua man, but only as there is something
divine within him. And the active development of this
something is as much superior to the exercise of the
other virtues as reason in its purity is superior to the
mixed or composite nature of humanity in general. If
then reason is divine in comparison with the man’s
whole nature, the life according to reason must be
divine in comparison with human life. Nor ought we
to pay regard to those who exhort us that, as we are
men, we ought to think human things and to keep our
eyes upon mortality : rather, as far as may be, we
should endeavour to rise to that which is immortal
and do everything to live in conformity with what
is best in us; for, if in bulk it is but small, yet in
power and dignity it far exceeds everything else that
we possess. Nay, it may even be regarded as consti-
tuting our very individuality, since it is the supreme
element, and that which is best in us. And if so,
then it would be absurd for us to choose any life
but that which is properly our own. And this agrees
with what was said before ” (in relation to the defini-
tion of happiness) “ that that which is characteristic
of any nature is that which is best for it, and gives
it most joy. Such, therefore, to man is the life
according to reason, since it is this that makes him
man.” 1
l Eth. i 11776 , 27 .
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 313
In this passage we must not miss the verbal con-
tradiction. The theoretic life is beyond the measure
of humanity ; it is the life of God rather than of
man. Yet, from another point of view, it is the life
wherein that which constitutes the very nature and
individuality of man, his characteristic power or
faculty, alone finds its appropriate exercise. The
sharp division which Aristotle makes between the
two lives which man can live, makes it difficult for
him to say where the central principle of man’s
being is to be placed, and what, strictly speaking,
constitutes the self or ego to which everything else
in him is to be referred. His words remind us of
a saying of Emerson that the consciousness of man
is a sliding-scale, which at one time seems to identify
him with the divine spirit, and at another with the
very flesh of his body. The rift that runs through
the philosophy of Plato seems here to have widened
till it rends human nature asunder. The result is a
division of the contemplative from the practical life,
which has had momentous results in the history of
philosophy and theology. It is the source of what
has sometimes been called the c intellectualism ’ of
Greek philosophy, which passed from it into the
Christian church in the form of the exaltation of the
monastic life above any life that can be lived in
the world. And Thomas Aquinas was only following
out the principles of Aristotle when he exalted the
814 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
contemplative above the moral virtues, and maintained
that the latter related to the former dispositive sed non
essentialitcr. 1 This transition of thought was already
made easy by the religious turn of expression which
Aristotle and his followers often use. It is specially
marked in the Eudemian Ethics, where we are told
that the highest life is to worship and contemplate
God, Qepaireveiv rov Qeov kcil Oewpdv. Professor Burnet
translates this by the familiar words : “ to glorify God
and to enjoy him for ever ” : but we must remember
that for Aristotle this enjoyment consists in a pure
contemplative activity, in which thought rises above
all discourse of reason into unity with its object, and
rests in it as its final and complete satisfaction.
The farther development of this view and the dis-
cussion of the error and truth which are mingled in
it, will be the subject of the next lecture.
1 Summoby S.S. 9. 180, 2.
LECTURE TWELFTH.
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OE REASON IN ITS
THEORETICAL USE.
Ix the last lecture I have shown that; although
Aristotle regards reason as the form of man’s life,
he does not conceive of it as constituting a self or
personality which equally manifests itself in all his
feelings, thoughts and actions. In other words, he
does not regard man as an organism, in which all
the parts imply each other and the whole, because
they are all the realisation of one principle. Rather
he thinks of him as a combination of reason with
an irrational element, which it cannot completely
absorb or take up into itself.
But this view gives rise to a double difficulty :
for, in the first place, it involves the severance of
the theoretical from the practical life, of the life in
which reason is purely self-determined and one with
itself, from the life in which it determines a matter
that is alien to itself : and, in the second place, it
makes it impossible, even in the practical life, to
316 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
arrive at any clear notion of the principle of activity.
At times reason seems to be represented by Aristotle
as constitutive of its own motives, and, therefore, as
one with will ; as when he declares that “ reason
always chooses the best,” and that “the good man
is he who obeys reason.” 1 But elsewhere reason is
conceived as the faculty of the universal and not of
the particular, a purely theoretical faculty which
“moves nothing,” 2 and must be determined to action
by the appetitive part of man’s nature, by which alone
an object or end can be prescribed as desirable.
Yet Aristotle would certainly not accept the doctrine
of Hume that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave
of the passions” — because apart from them, it cannot
choose or reject anything. The natural passions are
for Aristotle immediate impulses, which are always
in excess or defect, and never, except by accident,
in the proper proportion in reference to the good of
man’s being as a whole. Having no measure in
th ems elves, they need a measure to come to them
from without; and from what can it come save
reason ? Aristotle seems to come near the solution of
the difficulty, when he detects in man a fiovXficns or
will of the good, that is, a desire for the satisfaction
of our whole being, which is quite different from
the particular passions ; for this is clearly a desire,
the contents of which could not be derived from
llli9a, 17 .
2 Eth. } 1139a, 36.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 817
anything but reason. Nay, more, the presence of
such a desire in us must be regarded as giving a
new character to all the other impulses ; for, in
virtue of it, all the particular ends of passion must
be sought not for themselves but sub rations boni ,
as means to the complete realisation and satisfac-
tion of the one self to which they are all related.
But Aristotle does not recognise this “ will of the
Good 55 as the essential impulse of a rational nature,
which underlies all its other tendencies; he seems
simply to mention it as one of the elements of
our being which is to be placed beside its other
desires. And when he comes to ask himself what
is the nature of that act of self-determination
which is implied in all moral action, he does not
connect it in any special way with the will of
the good, but defines it simply as a £ deliberative
desire, 5 meaning a desire accompanied by delibera-
tion as to the means of its satisfaction — a definition
which leaves desire and reason as two separate
elements which are connected only externally. Noi
is it by any accident or oversight that Aristotle is
drawn into this circular process, in which intelligence
and will presuppose each other ; it is the necessary
result of his conception of human nature as g
avvQe-rov, a combination of disparate elements. I:
desire be taken as separate from intelligence, intelli
gence can only be. what Hume makes it, ar
318 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
instrument by which the means of satisfying desire
is determined. Nor is it possible that any desire
should be in itself rational ; for, if reason be con-
ceived as determining a motive, it seems to be
leaving its own sphere and intruding into that
of will, which ex hypothesi is closed to it. And
Aristotle’s final deliverance 1 — that reason is the
real man, but yet that the life of reason is one
which he lives not qua man, but as having some-
thing divine in him — only shows the perplexity to
which he is reduced by the cross-currents of his
thought.
Now the ultimate cause of Aristotle’s defective
view of the unity of the life of man lies in the
fact, that he identifies reason primarily with its
conscious or reflective activity, the activity which
creates science and philosophy. He cannot, there-
fore, attribute to it, or at least to it alone, that
unconscious or unreflective activity which is implied
in all our ordinary experience, both theoretical and
practical. Hence he is obliged to explain that
experience as a sort of blend between reason and
sensation or desire, which has something in it essen-
tially non-rational. It was, indeed, the general defect
of Greek thought that, while it tended to exalt
reason, what it comprehended under that name was
rather the reflective power of the philosopher, the
1 Mh. i 11776 , 26 i>eq.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
319
scientific man, and the statesman — who is like a
scientific man in his mastery of the general principles
of legislation and administration — rather than the self-
consciousness and self-determination, which belongs
equally to all men, and is, indeed, that which makes
them men. Hence also Aristotle’s view of the political
and moral life was essentially aristocratic, though the
aristocracy he recognised was not one of birth but
of intelligence. Thus he regarded the Greek, with
his quick perceptions and superior rational power,
as a being almost of a different species from the
barbarian ; and he even refused to recognise the Greek
artizan, who practised a £ base mechanic trade/ as
fitted to discharge the functions of a citizen. The
same 4 intellectualism ’ — which made him look upon
science as something that can be attained only by
one who has risen above the contingency of particular
facts — shows itself in his separation of the higher
and more general functions of the State from the
occupations of the tradesman, whose vocation is to
supply the means for a life in which he does not
partake. Hence, instead of the organic unity of
society, we have a hierarchy in which the slaves
and mechanics furnish the basis for the life of those
citizens who share in the administrative, judicial
and legislative work of the State and enjoy its
privileges; and these in turn supply the conditions
for the still higher functions of the philosopher, who
320 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
lives for contemplation alone. For contemplation
is the only absolutely free activity, which never is
a means to anything but itself. 1
What, then, is the nature of this free activity, and
how is it possible for Aristotle to speak of it in the
terms he uses ? How is it possible for him to regard
science and philosophy as the purely self-determined
activity of reason, an activity which is free from
all the conditions to which practice is subjected?
How does reason emancipate itself from the chains
in which the will is bound? And, when it has so
emancipated itself, what is the subject-matter with
which it deals ? Can the science, which abstracts
from so much, still retain any real content for itself,
and must it not necessarily lose itself in empty
generalities ? These questions are not perhaps
capable of being answered in an unambiguous way,
or without considerable balancing between opposite
ways of understanding the language of Aristotle.
But the attempt to deal with them is necessary to
any one who would estimate fairly the results of
his thought and the influence he had upon sub-
sequent times, and, above all, upon the history of
theology.
We may begin by guarding against a possible
misunderstanding. Aristotle is by no means an
empiricist, yet no one can doubt that he makes
*Cf. m., X, 7,
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 321
immediate experience the starting-point of his thought;
and that, indeed, he conceives of all truth as being,
if not based upon such experience, ye t ultimately
derived from it. No one could show greater interest
in collecting facts, and in testing all the theories
which they had suggested to previous writers or
to the ordinary consciousness of men. Aristotle
made many collections of data which were relevant
to his special enquiries, nor was he impatient in
chronicling such data, even when he could make no
immediate scientific use of them. This is equally
true in relation to the structure and processes of
animal life, to the varieties of ethical sentiment, to
the different kinds of political organisation and to
the manifold forms of philosophical opinion. Aris-
totle’s aim is always to take as complete a view as
is possible of all the phenomena relevant to the sub-
ject he is investigating. Nor can he be said to have
ever neglected — as Bacon supposes him and all the
ancients to have neglected — to look for negative
instances. On the contrary, his first effort is in-
variably to seek out any appearance of disparity
or contradiction between the different phenomena, or
between the aspects in which they have presented
themselves to different persons. His principle and
his practice are at the very outset to bring to light
as many such difficulties as he can discover; and he
even holds that we cannot be sure that we have
VOL. L X
822 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
reached the truth of the subject under investigation,
unless we are able, by means of it, to explain not
only the phenomena or opinions if they have a real
basis, but also to show the reason of the mistake when
they have none. 1 A principle of science is thus
supposed to emerge, in the first instance at least,
as the result of a synthesis of the phenomena to be
explained, and as the key to all the difficulties con-
nected therewith. And if Aristotle be not aware
of the necessity of our modern methods of analysis
and experiment, and sometimes is too ready to
assume that he has all the necessary data without
them, at any rate he cannot be accused of failing
to make his inductions as complete as possible, or
of theorising without an attempt to realise all the
difficulties of his subject.
There is, however, another aspect of Aristotle’s
conception of science. All induction is with a view to
deduction or demonstration, and these, for Aristotle,
are two processes which are quite independent of
each other. Hence, in order to deduction, we must
first, by means of induction and dialectical discussion,
attain to some general principle from which infer-
ences may be drawn. Farther, all this process of
discussion only gives occasion for the intuitive action
1 j tilth., 1154a, 22. In the beginning of the 7th book of the
Ethics , Aristotle explains this method of investigation, and
examples of it may be found at the beginning of many of his
works.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 323
of reason, which grasps the principle of the subject,
and perceives its self-evidencing character. We
might, therefore, say that Aristotle starts from the
a posteriori to find the a priori ; in other words,
that he begins with a view of truth as a mass of
separate phenomena, which seem to be given to the
mind from without, and that he regards the intellectual
comprehension of these data as attained only when
the mind finds itself in its objects, or grasps as
their explanation a principle which needs no evidence
but itself. The process is otherwise described by
Aristotle as one in which we advance from what is
first to us to that which is first in the nature of
things. This regress from phenomena to their
principles is, however, a preliminary process, and
the proper movement of science begins with these
principles and seeks to show by demonstration all
that is involved in them.
Now we might at first be disposed to interpret
this as meaning simply that the scientific man finds
the starting-point of investigation in the immediate
appearances of sense, that he soon discovers that these
appearances, in the first view of them, are inconsistent
and even contradictory to each other, but that, by
bringing them together and comparing them, he rises
to an explanation, which enables him to remove their
apparent inconsistency and bring them all into agree-
ment with each other. But this is not what Aristotle
324 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
says. He does not expect that science will ever be
able to explain the particulars of sense from which it
starts; for, in his view, science, as such, deals with
the universal and the necessary, while the particulars
of sense have in them an element of contingency
which cannot be referred to any such principle. The
world, indeed, is conceived by him as consisting in a
multitude of individual things, in each of which
some specific principle is manifested ; but this specific
principle is not supposed to account for all that we
find in the individual things, still less for all that
happens to them. It cannot in this way explain any-
thing that results from the particular material basis
in which the form of the species is realised, or from
the external relations into which the particular object
is brought, but only the properties that are neces-
sarily involved in the form and can be logically proved
to be so involved. And, as logical proof for Aristotle
means simple deduction, it would seem to follow that
a science must be made up of universal judgments,
which are analytically deducible from each other. It
is probable that Aristotle was misled in some degree
by the example of mathematics, and that he did not
realise , 1 what Kant afterwards showed, that there is a
synthetical movement of thought in every step of the
Professor Cook Wilson has pointed out to me that in one
passage of the Metaphysic (1051a, 22 seq .) Aristotle seems to
discern the synthetic character of mathematical proof; but this
is an isolated statement.
In its theoretical use
325
process by which the science of mathematics is built
up. It is true that he calls attention to the fact that
mathematics has not to do with substances, but only
with special aspects of them which are abstracted from
their other aspects. And he also points out that
there are many such aspects of substances, e.g . their
motion, which may be made the subjects of special
sciences. Still he seems to contemplate it as the ideal
of a science, that it should be based upon the defini-
tion of a substance — a definition which expresses the
form realised in such a substance — and that its
demonstrations should result in the e xhi bition of all
the 'propria which are analytically deducible from that
definition . 1
1 Objection might be taken to the above statements, if they were
intended as a complete account of Aristotle’s views upon logical
method. They correspond to the ideal of science which is expressed
in the Metaphydc , Book 7. In the Posterior Analytic we find two
other views which are not easily reconcilable either with it or
with each other. In the first book nothing is said of substances,
as such ; but the general conception of demonstration is still that
it is deduction of propria from a definition. And it is implied, I
think, that this definition must express the formal cause of the
subject — say, a triangle — of which the science treats. Aristotle
seems mainly to be thinking of mathematics, though, as stated
above, he does not apprehend the synthetic character of mathema-
tical reasoning. In the second book, however, demonstration is
taken as the proof of the existence of an attribute, or the occurrence
of an event, through its own definition : and this definition may be
given through the efficient, as well as the formal and final causes.
Further, the cause in question is always the proximate cause, and
nothing is said as to the mode in which this cause is to be con-
nected with the definition of the subject, which in the first book
326 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
Now it is hardly necessary to say that Aristotle’s
actual efforts at scientific construction do not conform
to this type. He is not content, in practice, to seek
for some abstract principle or definition of the object
in question, and then to derive everything analytically
from it. What he usually does is, first, to establish
by induction and dialectical reasoning some very
general view of the subject of investigation, and then
to distinguish different elements within it, and to
endeavour, by further inductions and inferences, to
determine their relations as parts of a whole which is
one with itself through all its differences. He thus
proceeds not from the concrete to the abstract, but
from the abstract to the concrete, not by analysis and
was spoken of as supplying the middle term in scientific demonstra-
tion. Another view is suggested in the Metayihysic (Book 7, ch. 11
seq.) by the fact that Aristotle has great difficulty in determining
that the definition of a substance should express only its form and
not its matter. There and more definitely in his works upon the
science of nature (especially Phys., II, 8, and the Part. An., I, i) it
is recognised that there are two lines of scientific enquiry ; one,
which deals with the final cause (which is shown to he one with
the formal cause) and the properties deducible therefrom ; and
another, which deals with the necessary conditions of its realisa-
tion, and, therefore, with material and efficient causes. Matter,
of course, is here taken not as the indeterminate basis of all exist-
ence of which he speaks in Met., 1029a, 24, but as equivalent to
the material constituents (in our sense) of the plants or animals.
This corresponds to the view of Plato spoken of above (pp. 130,
241). I shall have to say more of it in the next chapter. In
reference to these differences, I can only suggest that Aristotle
forgets or modifies his general statements, when he has to deal
with particular branches of science.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
327
formal deduction, but by differentiation and integra-
tion ; or, in other words, by the evolution of differences
and the reconciliation of them or the discovery of their
relative character. In fact, there is no other way in
which scientific investigation can possibly proceed if it
would lead to any profitable result. For what in all
cases investigation must seek after is to exchange the
vaguely determined wholes of our immediate empirical
consciousness for that clear articulation and necessary
connexion of the different elements or aspects of a
subject, or, in other words, for that systematic complete-
ness and unity, which we call science. If we would
determine the nature of any whole, says Aristotle
himself on one occasion , 1 we must divide it into its
elementary parts and endeavour to define each of them
separately : but, in practice at least, he is never
content to conceive any real whole as the mere sum of
the parts or as the resultant of their action and
reaction upon each other, but seeks to discover how
the relative independence of the parts is consistent
with, and subordinated to, the unity of the whole.
Thus in the Politics he regards the separate families as
the elementary parts, or primitive cells, out of which
the State is made up, but he is not content to treat
the State as a multitude of families acting externally
upon each other ; rather he maintains that f the State
is prior to the family/ or in other words, that it is the
1 Post. An 966 , 15 .
328 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
higher ethical unity of the State, which first enables
us to comprehend fully the function of the family as
a constituent part of it.
But, though the actual science of Aristotle does
not agree with his logical ideal, it would be a
mistake to suppose that this ideal is without
influence upon his philosophy. On the contrary, his
logical ideal is the counterpart of his conception of
individuality as involving, so to speak, a nucleus of
specific determination in each individual substance,
which is embedded in a mass of accidents. In other
words, Aristotle sharply divides the individual as
an object of sense from the universal principle which
is realised in it, and which enables us to make it
an object of science. He separates the individual
as having a specific character from the individual as
this particular being in its particular environment.
Nor does it carry us much farther that in one passage
in the Metaphysics he speaks as if there were a definite
form and a definite matter for every individual, 1 so
long as the form and the matter are not conceived as
essentially and entirely relative to each other, that
is, so long as the latter is conceived as in any sense
accidental or as the source of accidents. For, so long
as the separation of these two factors of reality is
maintained, we are obliged to regard the true nature
of the individual as consisting in that which he
1 Met . , 1071a, 28.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 329
is, or would be, apart from all relation to other
individuals. Nor can we, on Aristotle's principles,
consider this as a mere distinction of the different
points of view from which we regard the individual,
as, on the one hand, a separate being, and as, on the
other hand, a part of a more comprehensive in-
dividuality. Aristotle, indeed, seems at times to
encourage this conception, as when he tells us that
an individual human being, when severed from society,
is no more worthy of being called a man than a hand,
when separated from the body, would be worthy of
being called a hand. Are we then to say that there
are different degrees of substantiality or individuality,
and that a civic society is a higher kind of substance
than an individual man ? Could the Aristotelian
philosophy allow of such a conception of substance
or individuality ?
There are some passages in Aristotle in which this
conception is at least suggested. Thus in the 11 seventh
book of the Metaphysics 1 he raises the question how a
substance can be defined. To define it, he argues, we
must resolve it into its elements ; but what can these
elements be ? They cannot be substances, for sub-
stances by their very nature as individuals are separated
from each other, and different substances cannot be
contained in one substantial unity. Yet they cannot
be other than substances, for it is impossible to suppose
1 Met., VII, 13.
330 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
a substance made up of qualities or relations. It
would appear, therefore, that a substance cannot be
resolved into any elements at all, and, therefore,
cannot be defined. Yet the substance is just that
which we seek to define; indeed, it is on the defini-
tion of it that all demonstrative science is based.
Aristotle ends with the promise of a further dis-
cussion of the subject, a promise which is nowhere
adequately fulfilled. 1
Yet there are passages in this chapter which
seem to suggest that what from one point of view
may be regarded as an individual substance or
self-determined whole — say, an individual man —
may from another point of view be regarded as a
res incomplete i, an imperfect individuality, when we
realise his essential relation to other individuals
in society. 2 If, however, Aristotle had ever entered
*So far as I am aware, the only attempt which he makes in
this direction is in a passage already quoted (Met., 10456, 16) in
which he speaks of form and matter as essentially correlative.
This, however, could not really solve the difficulty ; for, in the
first place, this correlativity is not consistently maintained ; and,
in the second place, even if it were maintained, it would not
enable us to distinguish different elements in the form. For
Aristotle does not seem here to he speaking of matter in the sense
of the logical genus.
2 Met., 1039a, 2. This seems to be involved in what he says
of the principle that ij ivreXex^La x^P^h and that e.g. in the
number 2, the two units exist only potentially, while they exist
actually only when the units are separated from each other. This
would seem to point to the only possible solution of the arropla
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
331
upon his course of explanation, he would have been
carried on, like Plato, from the individual to the
State and from the State to the world, and he would
have been able to find absolute individuality only where
Plato found absolute universality, in the uni verse as a
whole or in God as its principle. In other words, he
would have been obliged to regard all other individual
substances but God or the universe as imperfectly
individualised, and he would have been compelled at
the same time to treat the conception of the contingent
or accidental as existing only from the point of view
of the part. But to have done this would have been
to go quite beyond the general principles which he
acknowledges in all his speculations. Aristotle,
indeed, as we shall see, holds that there is in God
a unity which transcends and comprehends all the
forms of things, a unity of the intelligible world ; but
he never imagined that any such unity is to be found
in the world of experience.
To discover Aristotle’s view of the highest kind
of unity to which science can attain, we must turn
with which the chapter ends, whether a substance can be composed
of substances or of elements that are not substances, both of which
alternatives are impossible. It can, we may answer, he composed
of substances, but these substances can exist in it only potentially
or as elements of its higher individuality. They can exist actually
only when this higher substance is destroyed. This seems the
necessary consequence of Aristotle’s reasoning, but he nowhere
accepts it. Nor, indeed, could he accept it without great modifi-
cations in his theory of ouvlai.
332 ARlSTOTLE*S VIEW OF REASON
to the De Anima, where he treats it mainly from
the point of view of the subject of knowledge.
In that treatise he discusses the position of intelli-
gence in relation to the complex nature of man, and
endeavours to explain its nature as a universal faculty
which yet is subjected in its development to the
conditions of man’s finite life. For while, as I have
stated above , 1 it is the characteristic of reason to
be determined by nothing but itself, yet it cannot
act or develop itself in man without the aid of
sensuous perception and imagination. It must, there-
fore, be capable of receiving impressions, and, indeed,
of receiving impressions from all the objects which
can be known by it ; yet, on the other hand, these im-
pressions must not alter its own nature or do anything
except to give it occasion to determine itself. How
is it possible to combine such opposite conditions ?
To discover Aristotle’s answer to this question, it is
necessary to follow somewhat closely the pregnant
and somewhat obscure utterances in which he sets
before us his view of the rational life of man.
In the first place, he declares 2 that there is an
analogy between reason and sense, in so far as both are
capable of being affected, in some way, by objects, and
so stimulated to apprehend them. Yet, as he contends
such affection or stimulation only makes them realise
what potentially they are. Hence in apprehending
1 Pp. 292 seq. : 331 seq. 2 De An.> III, 4 seq.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
333
their objects, sense and reason may be said to be only
apprehending themselves. But there is a two-fold
difference between them. For, in the first place,
each sense is confined to a definite object — the ear
to sound, the eye to colour, etc. — and even that object
it can apprehend only within certain limits of in-
tensity. But reason has no limit to its capacity in
either of these aspects : it is capable of apprehending
all objects and under all conditions. Like pure
matter, it is a potentiality for all the forms of
things; for it has no nature of its own which could
come between it and other things or prevent it
from seeing them as they are. Hence it is not
going beyond itself in knowing anything else. Rather
in all knowledge it is realising its own nature and
so coming to a consciousness of itself. We may.
therefore, say that it is absolutely impassive, in so
far as in no exercise of its knowing faculty is it
drawn beyond itself or subjected to a foreign
influence. Rather in apprehending objects it £ gains
the mastery’ over them, and uses them to evolve
its own powers. While, therefore, the data of
sense may supply the first occasion for its action,
the principle of its activity is always in itself, and
we have to conceive all the process of its develop-
ment as one of self-determination; or, as Aristotle
puts it, of the determination of the passive by
the active reason. Aristotle’s conception of reason,
334 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
however, as at once a universal receptivity and a pure
activity, has given occasion to so much controversy
that it seems desirable to quote his own words. 1
“ Here,” he declares, “ we have to bring in a
distinction of elements or factors, which prevails
throughout all nature. For in every kind of reality
we find, on the one hand, a matter as the potentiality
out of which it is produced, and, on the other
hand, a cause or active principle which realises itself
therein: and this distinction necessarily extends to
the soul. There is then a reason, the characteristic of
which is that it becomes everything, and a reason the
characteristic of which is that it produces everything.
And the latter exists as a positive source of activity, 2
like light which turns potential into actual colour.
Now it is this form of reason which exists separately,
unmingled and impassive, its very being consisting
in its activity; for that which is active is always
superior to that which is passive, and the determining
principle to the matter it determines. But science,
in which active reason realises itself, is one with
the reality which is its object ; while the potentiality
of science, though prior to actual science in time
in the individual, is posterior to it even in time, if
we speak generally. Nor must we suppose that the
active reason sometimes thinks and sometimes does
1 De An., III, 5.
2 2(ts ns, I think the opposition of ££ is to o-ripijo-Ls is suggested.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
335
not think ; it thinks always, though it manifests this
its essential nature only when it has been separated;
and it is of it alone that we can say that it is
immortal and eternal. We however ” (as the finite
subjects in whom reason realises itself) “ are liable to
forgetfulness; for though the rational power which
is in us cannot be affected by anything else, there
is also in us a passive reason, which is capable of
decay and death, and except by means of this passive
reason we do not think anything . 51
In this chapter we can see very clearly the diffi-
culties under which Aristotle is placed in attempting
to bring together the two aspects of man's intelli-
gence, as a universal principle which yet must be
conceived as developing itself in a finite individual
subject. Reason, from the former point of view, is
impassive and active and it can be deter min ed by
nothing but itself. Yet at first it exists in man
only as a potentiality ; and as a potentiality
it would seem to be exposed to influences from
without, while, as a universal potentiality, it
would seem to be exposed to such influences from
everything. How does Aristotle unite these two
apparently contradictory characteristics of it? He
does so, as I have already pointed out, simply
by showing that all that such influences can do is
to become the occasion, not of imposing anything
upon reason, or putting anything into it from without,
336 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
but only of calling out its power of determining
itself. Its universal potentiality or openness to
everything — which at first sight looks like emptiness,
and seems to involve its being subject to every im-
pression — is really a capacity of overpowering every
such impression, and finding itself in everything.
“It must therefore, since it apprehends all things,
be pure and unmingled, that it may overcome all
objects, that is, that it may know them .” 1
But this, again, raises the question, how objects
are in the first instance given to reason? Aristotle
answers that they are given to it through the per-
ceptions of sense, and the images which are derived
therefrom. But we have to remember, in the first
place, that even the perceptions of sense are not for
Aristotle mere impressions; for, as we have seen,
objects act upon sense only to call out its own
potentiality. Thus the activity of sense already
strips objects of their ‘ sensible matter/ and appre-
hends only their ‘sensible forms.’ These sensible
forms, again, which are taken up into the imagin-
ation, though they are free from the sensible matter
of their objects, have still what Aristotle calls an
f intelligible matter ’ 2 attaching to them, in so far
as they are images of objects in space and time,
1 j De An., 429a, 19.
2 Aristotle’s conception of ‘intelligible matter 5 has a close analogy
to Kant’s doctrine as to the forms of sense (cf. Met., 1036a, 10),
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
337
and not, therefore, objects of pure thought. Thus
they are not in the highest sense intelligible,
though, as Aristotle maintains, we cannot think at
all without them. They are the vehicles in
which the forms of things are brought within the
reach of our intelligence, the occasions for pure
reason to exercise its faculty and to evolve its
potentiality. It is in this sense, then, that Aris-
totle says that the development of knowledge means
the determination of reason as passive or potential
by reason as active. But he is obliged to add that
such determination is not possible, except so far as
the passive reason is already supplied with the
images of sense; and that it is in these images or
sensible forms, and not directly in itself, that the
reason finds at first the objects or forms which are
purely intelligible . 1 In this way the self-determina-
tion of the mind does not exclude its receiving its
forms through the medium of sense and imagina-
tion ; for, in doing so, it is not receiving into itself
anything foreign, but only, as it were, recovering and
recognising what is its own. All that reason has to
do is to set aside or discount the intelligible matter
in such images, in order to grasp its proper object,
the object in which alone it can find itself.
1 h to is dSecri tols aio-drjToTs ra vorjra £<rn (De An., 432a, 4). Our
actualized knowledge for Aristotle is of the individual, which is pre-
sented in sense or imagination (cf. Met., 1087<z, 19), though we
can distinguish the universal from the particular element in it.
YOU J. Y
338 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
We see, then, how it is that Aristotle could make
a distinction between the active and the passive
reason, and yet regard them as one. The reason of
man, in his view, is identical with the absolute reason,
with this difference — that the absolute reason is com-
plete in itself, and independent of all time-process,
while in man reason,, at first, appears as a potenti-
ality which can be developed only by means of the
data of sense. Yet these data are merely means or
occasions of its own action, and what it finds in
them, or rather, we might say, extracts from them, is
the pure forms which are one with its own nature.
In this sense, therefore, it is never determined by
anything hut itself. We are not, therefore, to think
of the active reason as something external to the
individual, but simply as the correlate of the
universal potentiality which belongs to him as a
finite subject, who cannot realise himself at once,
but only by a process of development. Our know-
ledge, as knowledge, is the manifestation of a
universal principle, and yet, from another point of
view, it is dependent on a sensible process, which
must be stimulated from without by its appropriate
objects. Thus it is limited in its evolution by the
conditions of a sensitive life, from which, nevertheless,
it emancipates itself in so far as it is realised. We
know, indeed, as ‘spectators of all time and exist-
ence,’ as conscious subjects who are only as they
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
339
think and think as they are; for intelligence is the
same thing in all in whom it is developed, and in
every one its nature is to emancipate itself from
individual conditions, and to regard things not from
the point of view of a particular organism, but from
the point of view of a pure subject of knowledge.
Hence, while, in one sense, reason is what is most
our own, in another sense it may be said to be in-
dependent of the individuality in which it is realised ;
for, in so far as we know, it is not our individu-
ality which is in question, but the reason that dwells
in us; and if this reason were completely realised,
it would be an intelligence which no longer took
any account of the particular self as a being with a
determinate individual existence in space and time.
It would not remember nor expect, and it would be
free from all feelings of love and hate, which depend
on the personal relations of this individual. Nay,
we may go farther : for, as all finite individu-
ality would drop out of view for a subject which
contemplated only the forms of things in their pure
ideal relations with each other, there would for it be
no difference in things which would not be at once
transparent, and therefore no process from one thing
to another. Discourse of reason would cease in the
pure intuition of truth in its -unity.
This view of reason will become more intelligible,
if we follow Aristotle a little farther in the contrast
34*0 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
he draws between pure reason and the discursive
faculty which, for want of a better name, we might
call the understanding. Reason, as we have seen,
apprehends its objects in their intelligible forms,
freed from all the images of sense. It grasps the
ideal unity which is hidden from us by the sensible
or intelligible matter, that is, by the manifold sensuous
or imaginative elements in connexion with which
they are at first presented. For it, therefore, objects
are simple and indivisible, as is the act of thought
wherein they are known. And, as this intuitive act
is completely one with itself and does not admit of
division, it excludes the possibility of error. In
this activity of reason, therefore, there are no
degrees of knowledge; we either know the truth
altogether or we do not know it at all. In
our ordinary consciousness of things, on the other
hand, we have to admit the possibility of many
intermediate stages between absolute ignorance and
complete knowledge : for in ordinary experience we
have to deal not with transparent unities in which
no element can be separated from the rest, but
with complex data including in themselves many
disparate elements, which may be connected with
each other but cannot be identified. And in forming
such connexions, the discursive reason or under-
standing has to proceed by judgment and inference.
Thus it moves from one point or datum to another,
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
841
without having, at least while the process lasts,
any intuition of the unity of the whole. The highest
result of this discursive process, however, is just to
attain such an intuition ; and when the intuition
comes, it will make the process of thought super-
fluous ; for the mind, to which the whole object is an
indivisible unity, has no longer any need to connect
the parts together by any links of argument.
In the last paragraph, I am perhaps going a little
beyond the words of Aristotle, but not, I think,
beyond what is implied in them. For the simplicity
and indivisibility of the objects of reason ca nn ot be
taken as absolutely excluding all difference, but
only as meaning that no element can be separated
from the rest. We may, therefore, illustrate what
Aristotle means by comparing the kind of know-
ledge of a science which is possessed by the
learner or discoverer — for whom every new step is
a surprise till it has been brought by reasoning into
connexion with what is already known — with the
kind of knowledge possessed by one who grasps the
science as a unity in which every truth involves all
the others. In this sense, the whole process of
learning might be described as the process whereby
discursive passes into intuitive reason; for the ideal
which in all investigation we are seeking, and in
which alone the scientific impulse can be satisfied,
is that of a unity of knowledge which is completely
342 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
differentiated into all its parts and yet seen to be
one with itself through all its differences. The
great steps in the progress of thought are just
those in which some new insight makes a scattered
mass of observations and inferences suddenly coalesce
into one indivisible body of truth.
"While, however, we may fairly interpret in this
way what Aristotle says of the indivisible objects
of reason, we have to remember that for him these
objects are not the phenomena of ordinary experience
but the intelligible forms of things, and these alone.
For it is only 'in things without matter 5 that
reason finds the objects, which it can identify witli
itself. Hence Aristotle goes on to contrast these
objects not only with sensible objects but even
with all objects which possess 'intelligible matter. 5
Anything that has quantity — anything that occupies
a part of space and time — has in it an imagina-
tive element which is inconsistent with the pure
unity of thought. A quantitative whole, indeed,
may be apprehended as a unity and by one
indivisible act of mind ; for, though divisible, it
may not be actually divided in our apprehension
of it. In other words, we may take it as con-
tinuous or as discrete just as we please ; and
while, in the former case, the act of mind by
which it is apprehended is one and indivisible, in
the latter case the mental activity becomes divided
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 343
into several acts like its object. But in the case
of the pure form, there is no such alternative
possibility. The intelligible form, as such, is simple,
and it cannot be apprehended except in one indivisible
act of thought ; for in the case of such a form, as
we have already seen, we must either have absolute
knowledge, or we must be completely ignorant . 1
In the contrast thus drawn by Aristotle between
an object quantitatively determined, and an object of
pure thought, there is a measure of truth ; for a
quantity, as such, is not an organic whole. We
may take it either in its unity with itself or in its
difference, either in its continuity or in its discretion,
as we please ; but we cannot conceive it as an object
which is one with itself in and through its difference,
so long as we take it simply as a quantity. On the
other hand, anyone who leaves out the quantitative
aspect of things altogether, in order to reach their
unity, will, so far, be making that unity empty and
abstract. He will be securing unity not by synthesis,
but by the omission of difference and multiplicity.
And if he proceeds farther in this direction, the
simplicity he attains will not be that of a whole
which is indivisible — because no part of it can be
conceived without the rest — but that of a bare identity,
1 JDe An., 430 b, 5-20. We must however always remember that in
our knowledge the vovs 7ra9i]TLK6s is always involved, and we cannot
voeiv avev (pavTacrfiaros, though we may discount the image.
344 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
which is one with itself because it has no content
at all. The exclusion of the quantitative from the
unity of the pure form thus suggests a suspicion
that Aristotle is seeking for unity by the way of
abstraction. And this suspicion is confirmed by what
he says in the immediate context , 1 in which he seems
to be answering the objection that the pure forms
cannot be simple because they have negatives or oppo-
sites, which are apprehended by the same act of mind
whereby we grasp the forms themselves; for the
knowledge of opposites is one. If this be the case,
therefore, it seems impossible that the knowledge of
such forms can be attained by a simple and in-
divisible act of mind.
Now, the true answer to this difficulty would seem
to be that, as correlated factors in one conception, the
positive and the negative, the form and its opposite,
are apprehended in one indivisible act of thought, and
that, in this sense, they constitute a simple and
indivisible unity. But the answer of Aristotle appears
to be not this, but that the negatives or opposites of
the pure forms exist only in the phenomenal world, in
the region of matter and change. Hence also the
mind only apprehends the negatives or opposites of the
forms along with them, in so far as it has a material
or sensible basis, and, therefore, itself belongs to the
world of change. But for the absolute intelligence no
1 De An., 4306 . 20 .
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
345
opposition or negation can exist. It has no connexion
with matter, and, therefore, no alternative potentiali-
ties. In its pure intuitive energy it is simply positive
or affirmative of itself, and has not to deal with the
negative, even as a possibility . 1
Now I will not say that such language is quite
conclusive as to Aristotle’s views. It is possible to
take it as meaning simply that all oppositions and
differences of thought are relative, and imply a unity
which transcends them ; and that a perfect intelligence
must contemplate all things in relation to this unity.
If we adopted this view, we might say that Aristotle
does not dismiss negation and opposition as unreal or
as not entering into the objects of reason, but simply
contends that they are never to be taken as absolute
negation or opposition ; in other words, that they are
only to be regarded as expressing the negative relation
to each other of the indivisible factors of one whole.
But when we consider Aristotle’s general treatment of
the idea of negation, and how he frequently attacks
Plato for maintaining that opposites directly affect
each other, it is difficult to attribute to him any such
doctrine. In his whole discussion of the law of con-
tradiction, again, he seems to lay all the emphasis
upon the reciprocal exclusiveness of the affirmative
and the negative ; nor does he ever seem to realise the
truth that, if things have no positive relation, they
1 De An., 4306 , 24 : ci. Met., 10755 , 24 .
846 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
cannot even exclude each other ; for, even in order to
exclusion, they must be conceived as included in some
larger unity. Finally, this view of Aristotle’s meaning
is confirmed by the comparison which he draws 1
between the intuition by which reason apprehends the
pure forms of things and the apprehension by sense of
the ‘ special sensibles,’ which also he regards as simple
and indivisible, independent of all judgment or infer-
ence, and therefore exempt from the possibility of
error. Aristotle fails to see that even the special
sensibles cannot be apprehended without discrimination,
nor, therefore, without mental process. On the other
hand, even if we could conceive of something — say, a
sensation of sound or colour — as given to the mind
through sense, in an immediate intuition which implied
no activity of thought, it would not * supply any fit
illustration of the intuitions of reason. For, though
an intuition of reason may be called simple and
indivisible, it is not in the sense of a bare unit which
has no mediation, but in the sense of an organic unity,
whose manifold elements are so perfectly mediated
with each other that we can no longer think of any
one of them except as involving, and involved in, the
whole.
To sum up the result of this lecture. Our exami-
nation of the Aristotelian conception of science has
shown that his separation of the theoretical from the
1 De An., 430 b, 29 seq.
347
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE
practical activity of reason is based upon a principle
which greatly narrows his view of the former.
Practice is conceived as an imperfect manifestation
of reason because it deals with the particular; and,
on the same grounds, practical science is regarded
as less exact, and therefore of less scientific value
than the other sciences. For science, in the highest
sense of the word, has only to do with the definition
of substances and the deduction of consequences from
these definitions. It thus excludes from its considera-
tion the accidental element which enters into the
nature and the circumstances of every individual
finite substance. It deals only with the universal,
the pure forms of things and what is demonstrable
from them. In the De Anima we are carried a step
farther, in so far as the demonstrative process itself
a PP ears ^e discounted or transcended in the idea
of a pure intuition of reason. For the objects which
reason grasps are, as we have seen, simple and in-
divisible, and their whole nature must be apprehended
in a simple and indivisible act. blow, if we take
this simplicity in the highest sense, it will refer not
to an abstract unit or identity, but to the organic
or super-organic unity of a whole, in which no part
can ever be separated from the rest without losing
its essential character. What, on this view, Aristotle
means, is that we know a thing truly only when its
diversity is completely taken up into its unity, so
348 ARISTOTLE’S VIEW OF REASON
that, if known at all, it must be known as in all its
constituents the expression of one principle. In this
sense it might without difficulty he acknowledged
that the discourse of reason culminates in making
way for an intuition, which completely transcends
it, and renders it henceforth unnecessary. But Aris-
totle fails to develop his view to its consequences,
and that in two ways. In the first place, he forgets
to trace the necessary connexion between the discur-
sive operations of the mind and the intuition in
which they result. At least we cannot find that he
calls attention to the fact that the object of the
intuition is a concrete unity, which contains in itself
all the elements distinguished and related by the
discursive faculty, though, of course, it casts upon
them a new light which greatly alters our first thoughts
of them. In the second place, Aristotle’s initial error
in making an essential division between form and
matter, or in not carrying out fully the idea that
they are correlative with each other, leads to a separa-
tion of the world of experience, the world of change
which is subjected to the conditions of space and
time, from the world of intelligible forms which can
be only apprehended by pure reason. Hence, as
the unity of the intuitive reason is not reached
by means of a synthesis which embraces all things
in their concrete nature, but only by a synthesis
of all things in their pure form without any matter,
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 349
it is a unity which is reached by abstraction from
many of the aspects of reality. And it is a
dialectical necessity that he who omits any element
of the whole, will be driven to omit other elements
connected with them, and others again connected with
these, till the whole is emptied of its contents and
reduced to a barren identity. Thus Aristotle, the
most scientific of minds, had placed his philosophy,
as it were, upon a sliding-scale, which leads ultimately
to the mystical negation of all science. At the s am e
time, we can see that the organic idea, which he never
consistently applied but which never ceases in some
degree to influence him, leaves the result of his
philosophy somewhat ambiguous, and even makes it
possible for some interpreters to maintain that he
rose ‘above all dualism’ 1 to the conception of the
world as a self-consistent system. Nay, he even
seems to assert the same thing himself. 2 Before,
however, we can venture to pronounce a final judg-
ment upon this (question, we must consider Aristotle’s
doctrine as to the nature of God and his relation
to the world.
1 See especially A. Bullinger, Aristotle’s Metaphysic and Ms various
other essays upon Aristotelian subjects.
2 Met., 1076a, 4.
LECTURE THIRTEENTH.
DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG TO REASON
OB TO WILL?
In the last two lectures we have considered Aristotle's
views of the practical and of the theoretical life,
and the grounds on which he regards the latter as
a purer and higher expression of reason than the
former. Practical reason has to realise itself in a
subject-matter which is not purely rational but
mixed with contingency, and in which the univer-
sality of pure science is reduced to generality, and
the absolute necessity of law to the hypothetical
necessity of empirical fact. But the theoretical
reason is free from all such limits. Its object is
the universal and eternal, the forms of things apart
from their matter, and as these forms are the
counterpart of its own nature, it may even be said
that its only object is itself. From this it follows
that ethics cannot, as Plato supposed, be based upon
metaphysics. Indeed, whatever connexion there is
REASON OR WILL 351
between them lies in the opposite direction; for it
is the virtues of the moral and political life that
form the indispensable basis or precondition for the
development and exercise of those higher qualities
which are shown in the life of contemplation.
Aristotle’s exaltation of theory above practice will
become more intelligible if we compare it with the
opposite view T which is more prevalent in modern
times, and which regards science as confined to the
narrow sphere of a finite experience, while it finds a
way to the infinite only through ideas connected
with our practical life. On the whole, ancient
philosophy tended towards what has been called
( intellectualism * and regarded the pure activity of
reason as that in which man rises into the most
intimate communion with the divine. But in modern
times, especially since Kant, the trend of opinion has
often been in the opposite direction, namely, to regard
scientific knowledge as limited to the phenomenal
world of experience, and to look to the impulses of
the will or the demands of practical reason to
free us from such limitations and supply us with
grounds for belief in some higher reality. If we
can discern the causes of this marked difference
between the ancient point of view and that which
has been most popular, at least in recent times, it
will carry us some way toward the determination
of their respective values ; in other words, it will
352 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
help us to decide whether the truth lies in either
of these extremes or in some higher view in which
the opposition between them is transcended,
Now, we have already seen how Aristotle was
led to his view of the primacy of the contemplative
life. The opposite view, which has been much
favoured in recent speculations on the nature of
religion, finds its foremost representative in Kant.
It was the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason to
show that the objective world — the only world of
which we can have scientific knowledge — is a
thorough-going system of necessity, a system of
objects represented as existing in space and time,
and reacting upon each other according to fixed
laws which are altogether independent of our will.
Of this objective system we, as natural beings, are
parts, and in it we find the satisfaction of our
immediate impulses; but there is nothing in it or
in ourselves as parts of it, which could suggest
the existence of any principle either within or without
or above us other than the necessity of nature, the
necessity that connects all objects with each other.
When, however, we reflect on the conditions of our
knowledge of this world of externally related pheno-
mena, we see that such knowledge is possible only
through the unity of the self within us and by the
thorough-going synthesis of phenomena according to
the principles of the understanding. For, in order
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
353
that objects may exist for us, it is necessary that
the intelligence should combine the data, given in
sense under the forms of time and space, by the
aid of the principles of causality, reciprocity, and
the other principles of the understanding, so as
to produce a connected experience — an experience
which can be referred to one self. But this,
again, leads to a further step in the analysis
of knowledge; for, when we realise what is meant
by this reference of experience to the unity of one
self, we see that it involves certain ideas or ideals
of reason, by which we are guided in applying the
principles of the understanding. The conscious self
in all its constructive activity — in its endeavour to
construe its own life, in its endeavour to determine
the connexion of outward phenomena, and finally in
its effort to bring together in one both these forms
of experience — is guided and stimulated by the ideas
of the self, the world and God ; and of each of these
it thinks as a systematic whole which is absolutely
one with itself through all its differences. Of these
ideas it cannot get rid, yet neither is it possible
for it to realise or verify them in experience.
The ultimate verdict of the Critique in relation to
them is, therefore, an open one. To reason in
its theoretical use, they must always remain proble-
matical, that is, they must remain ideals which it
can and must aim at in the development of its
YOL. i. z
354 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
knowledge, but which it can neither assert nor deny
to be real. They are, as it were, dark lanterns
which illumine the object but not themselves, which
throw light upon experience and enable us to detect
its phenomenal character, yet without revealing
anything as to the existence of real objects corre-
sponding to themselves. If we have any right to
believe in the existence of any such objects, it must
be not upon theoretical grounds, but in virtue of
some practical necessity to affirm their reality.
Now, such a practical necessity is found in the
moral law which, as it issues unconditioned com-
mands, compels us to believe in our own freedom.
And the idea of an intelligible world is just the
conception on which we must take our stand, in
order to think of ourselves as self-determining beings , 1
or to refer our own actions to ourselves as their
origin and cause. Thus while the theoretical reason
forced us to deny that the ego is under the law
of necessity, which applies only to its objects, the
practical reason reveals to us that we are under
the law of freedom, or, in other words, that in all
our action we are determined only by ourselves.
But what is this law of freedom ? It is the
counterpart of the ideas of reason ; for these are all
reducible to different applications of the conception
1 Melaph. der Sitten, III, “ Von der aiissersten Grenze alley
practischeu Philosopliie, ”
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 355
of self-consistent or systematic unity. To say that
a rational being, as such, is under the law of freedom
means, therefore, that in all its actions it must be
consistent with itself, and that this consistency must
be its sole motive.
Now, if we free this idea from the ambiguity which
attaches to Rant’s different expressions of it — as bare
logical consistency, as consistency with the self, and as
consistency with the idea of a possible kingdom of
ends 1 — what he seems to mean is that a moral life is
one which in all its acts is in perfect organic unity
with itself. Further, as the unity of the self is a
principle to which all the intelligible world is relative,
the moral law not only demands the systematic unity
of the life of the individual, but postulates the idea of
a system of the universe in which all the ideas of
reason are realised, and all things are brought into
unity with each other and with the intelligence. In
other words, it postulates not only the freedom of the
individual, but the conformity of all the conditions
of his life to such freedom : or, as Rant puts it, it
postulates both the immortality of the soul to work
out its infinite task, and the existence of God as the
ultimate principle of unity by which the order of the
material world is conformed to the demands of self-
1 The main defects of Kant’s view arise, as I have tried to show
elsewhere ( Critical Philosophy of Kant , II, p. 218), from his follow-
ing out the first of these formulas to the exclusion of the other two.
356 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
determining reason, and happiness is bound up with
goodness.
The general result of Kant’s doctrine, then, is that,
while there is nothing in the objective world, viewed
simply in itself, to raise our thoughts above the
necessity of nature, we find in our practical conscious-
ness a sufficient warrant for the belief in our own
freedom and in the existence of a spiritual Being
like ourselves, who is the ultimate principle of all
reality, and through whom, therefore, all reality is
determined in conformity with the demands of our
spirits. This Being we cannot, indeed, know, as we
know the objects of ordinary experience, but the
thought of him is bound up with the consciousness
of self and with all the experience which the unity
of the self makes possible; and the belief in him
is implied in our consciousness of the law that gives
order and direction to our practical life. In this
case, and in this case alone, can we vindicate our
right to believe what we will to believe , but cannot
know ; and the limitations which science cannot
transcend are set aside by the imperative voice of
duty, which compels us to think of the universe as
ordered in conformity with itself.
Such, in outline, is the Kantian theory of the
relation of our ordinary experience — our immediate
consciousness of the world and ourselves — to that
higher idea of both which is presupposed by morality
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 357
and religion. And we find the same theory repeated
with modifications by many writers in the present day,
who, without adhering closely to Kantian principles,
adopt his general conception of the limits of know-
ledge. To such writers science seems to be confined
to the task of tracing out the lines of natural necessity
by which one phenomenon, or phase of existence, is
bound to another ; and the possibility of escape from
this iron circle of causation is supposed to be opened
up by the revolt of human hearts against it. Thus
the feeling of inconsistency between the conditions
of finite existence and the obligations laid upon us by
our spiritual nature, the demand of the soul for a good
more complete and enduring than any of the changing
objects of sense, or the aspiration after an ideal beauty
which is never adequately realised in the world — are
regarded as a sufficient warrant for casting aside the
ordinary tests of credibility and basing belief upon the
'will to lelieve . In many different ways the will, or
the heart, or the imagination, is supposed to emanci-
pate us from the limitations of sense and experience,
and to put us in relation to ends and objects which
cannot be brought within the scope of science.
Now it is easy to see that the two theories or
classes of theories, represented by Aristotle and Kant,
are diametrically opposed to each other, and it is
instructive to draw out the points of contrast between
them. With Kant science is confined to the discovery
358 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
of the laws which determine the co-existence and
succession of objects and events in the finite world of
experience, and it is only through the moral conscious-
ness and the practical faith which that consciousness
brings with it that we escape from the limits of this
system of necessity, and rise to the idea of a spiritual
God who rules over a free kingdom of spiritual beings.
With Aristotle, on the other hand, moral practice is
the hampered activity of reason, working with a matter
which can never be perfectly subdued or determined
by it, exercising itself in a medium which is exposed
to the inroads of a necessity that comes not from
within but from without, not from itself, but from
nature and circumstance; while it is science which
emancipates reason from this foreign yoke, and raises
it to a consciousness of all things in their ideal prin-
ciples, which is also a consciousness of their unity with
the mind that knows them : for, as Aristotle says, in
the case of things without matter, the knower and the
known are one. Thus it is only the mind which sees
the essential forms of things — their final or formal
causes — that can attain to the full consciousness and
realisation of itself. Putting this contrast in a slightly
different way, Kant holds that knowledge can grasp
only the external conditions of things, while it is the
faith that goes with the moral consciousness which
alone can give us insight into the final causes, the
ultimate forms of reality, the spiritual principles upon
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
359
which the universe is based. Aristotle, on the other
hand, looks upon practice as a continual struggle with
external necessity, while he thinks of dewpla, philoso-
phical contemplation, as the free converse of the mind
with itself, the activity of unimpeded reason, which is
at the same time the revelation of the nature of God
and of the immanent purpose of the universe. In
both cases, therefore, we have, on the one side; an
immediate view of the world as a region of accidental
co-existence and external necessity, and, on the other
side, a deeper view of it as the manifestation of a
spiritual principle, as an organic whole in which an
ideal design is ever realising itself. But the difference
is that the principles to which the two views are
referred change places, and the higher religious and
philosophical consciousness is in the one ease associated
with practice and in the other with theory.
Now this comparison is very instructive, whether
we look at the points in which the two views
agree or at those in which they differ. Looking
first at the points of agreement, we see that they
both start with the presupposition of a certain
irrational or non-rational element in things which
cannot be explained, though in the case of Aristotle
this element is taken as objective, and in the case of
Kant as subjective. Thus Aristotle presupposes that
there is in the world a substratum of matter, which
makes it impossible that formal or final causes should
360 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
be perfectly realised, and which obliges us to explain
many things by an external necessity, which is closely
allied with contingency, or, at least, leaves much
room for it. In like manner, mutatis mutandis
Kant bases our experience upon data of sense, of
which we can say nothing, except that so they are
given. Our mind, indeed, by the aid of principles
derived from itself can reduce these data into a
fixed and necessary order, and so can construct out
of them a world of experience. But it cannot make
this world wholly intelligible ; it cannot bring it into
agreement with the ideas of reason which are bound up
with its consciousness of itself. Thus in both philo-
sophies the immediate world of experience is conceived
as one in which we continually encounter contingency
or external necessity, and it is by abstraction from that
world, or rather from the irrational element in it, that
we are supposed to attain to the consciousness of
an intelligible reality, which is determined only by
idea or spiritual principles of connexion. These
principles, however, are to Kant only objects of a
practical faith which science cannot verify; while, to
Aristotle, they are the supreme objects of science,
and, indeed, if we take the word science in its
strictest sense, they are the only objects of science.
Now there is a plausible explanation of this
difference of view which many moderns would be
ready to give. It is that Aristotle is still entangled
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 361
in the illusive search for formal or final causes which
belongs to the metaphysical stage of thought. He has
not yet discovered what later philosophers were to
discover — that that search is hopeless, and that all we
can do is to observe the qualities of things as they
present themselves, to determine their quantitative
relations, and to find out the laws that govern their
co-existence and succession. To attempt anything
more is to go beyond the possibility of science; it is
to substitute anthropomorphic fancies for the truths
which we are able to ascertain by scientific methods.
When we think we discover design in nature, what
we see is not her real lineaments, but the reflexion of
our own faces. If we can attain to more than this,
the grounds of our belief must be not objective but
subjective, not derived from scientific scrutiny of the
world without, but by listening to some voice that
speaks within us. If, therefore, we have any right
to a faith that there is in nature a principle kindred
in some way to our own spirits, and that this principle
is the real cause or substance of the world without us,
we must find its ground simply in this — that, as Kant
showed, we cannot be true to ourselves or live in
accordance with the law of our own rational being
without presupposing or postulating such a principle.
Hence modern philosophy must speak with a humbler
voice than the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.
It must not pretend to determine scientifically the
362 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
highest principles of reality. It must be content
if it can find grounds for a rational faith that, behind
the phenomenal veil which hides the truth of things
from us, there is a divine reality which corresponds to
the highest needs of our souls. For us, in this region
of appearance, the true can never be coincident with
the good; but our souls refuse to believe in their
ultimate discord, and this refusal is itself a sufficient
evidence that, if we could see the whole truth, we
should find that they coincide.
It may, however, as I think, be shown that
there is a better way out of the difficulty. The
sharp antithesis between the phenomenal and the
real or intelligible worlds which is common to
Aristotle and Kant — whether it be conceived with
the former as a contrast between the sphere of
opinion and that of science, or with the latter as a
contrast between the sphere of science and that of
faith — is the result of a false abstraction. There is
no phenomenal world, no world in which reality is
veiled from us by a material or irrational element.
The only distinction is between the world as im-
perfectly conceived and the world as more adequately
interpreted. Kor is it true in regard to any object
that the utmost science can attain is to find out
the external relations of co-existence or succession,
in which it stands to other objects. It is, indeed,
true that this kind of explanation is the primary
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
363
work of science, and that, as I have said in a
previous lecture, neither Plato nor Aristotle had an
adequate perception of the difficulty and extent of
this work. It is also true that the higher teleo-
logical view of nature cannot be reached, except in
so far as this humbler work of science has been
achieved. But it is impossible to admit the abstract
contrast between mechanism and teleology in the
sense in which it has often been maintained. For,
in the first place, recent times have seen a new
attempt to use the conceptions of organism and
organic evolution in the explanation of the pheno-
mena of nature and, particularly, of the phenomena
of the life of plants and animals. But any appli-
cation of such categories to natural beings involves
that the kingdom of nature is not cut off by any
sharp line of division from the kingdom of spirit;
but that there are in nature indications of the
same upward movement towards an ideal end, which
is continued in a higher form in the moral effort
of the human will to attain an absolute good. In
this sense, modern thought has recognised the same
fact which Aristotle half-poetically expresses when
he speaks of a ‘ will of nature/ which reaches beyond
the particular impulses of the animals and seeks for
the preservation of the individual and the species.
Even Kant himself acknowledges that it is necessary
to use teleological ideas in dealing with living things;
364 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
though he treats this use as merely ‘ heuristic/ i.e.
as supplying a necessary point of view from which
we must carry on our scientific investigations, but
not as enabling us to attach any real predicates
to such beings as objects. But the division between
such a provisional hypothesis or postulate of science
and its recognised truth is not easy to maintain — as
is shown by the speculations of many of our modern
biologists, whose general repudiation of teleological
speculations does not prevent them from continually
in detail making use of the idea of purpose, whenever
it is necessary to explain any special modification of
structure or function that seems to conduce to the
preservation of the individual or the species.
We ought not, however, to make too much of
such concessions. For it must be allowed that the
main work of science has been to follow out the lines
of external connexion between phenomena, and that,
even in regard to the organic world, it generally
pursues the same method to the same result. Even,
therefore, if in this region it cannot altogether banish
the idea of final causes, yet it keeps that thought
as far as possible in the background; and it treats all
the phenomena with which it deals as the necessary
results of the action and reaction of elements
which are not themselves subordinated to any per-
vading unity. And the Darwinian theory, many as
are the applications of the idea of purpose to which
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
365
it has led, is itself an attempt to carry the idea
of an external necessity, resulting from the rela-
tions of the organism and the environment, into
the explanation of those very phenomena which
were once thought to be the clearest evidences of
design.
Rut, in the second place, there is a better way
of proving the limited and provisional character of
the ordinary scientific view of nature, as a system
of external necessity; and Kant himself, though he
maintained that view, and indeed, gave it a fuller
and more distinctive philosophical expression than
anyone before him, was also the first to supply the
conclusive means of refuting it. Eor, while he
treated the world of experience as a system of
objects — which are external to each other in space,
and pass through successive phases in time, according
to necessary laws of coexistence and succession — he
showed also that this world of necessity stands in
essential relation to the unity of the self that
knows it. Hence, any explanation of the world, or
of any object in it, which does not take account of
this relation, must be regarded as abstract and
imperfect. Thus the external necessity which charac-
terises the objective world when we regard it as
complete in itself (as it is generally regarded by
science), must receive a new interpretation when
we recognise that it cannot be separated from the
366 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
unity of the intelligence. When we rise above the
abstractions of the ordinary consciousness and of
science, and take a complete or concrete view of
the facts, we see that this external necessity never
exists apart from an identity which manifests itself
in it and controls it. This identity beyond difference,
indeed, was recognised by Kant only in the form of
an ideal of reason which cannot be realised in experi-
ence, or, in his language, of a regulative idea, which
cannot be treated as constitutive. But this view
implies an imperfect conception of the unity of self-
consciousness, and is quite inconsistent with Kant's
own conception of the relativity of objects to that
unity. For, if the object in its externality be an
abstraction which requires an ideal principle of
identity to complete it — if, in other words, the
object always has a subjective unity underlying all
its differences — we can no longer admit that Kant's
categories of the understanding are the highest prin-
ciples we can apply to the contents of our experience.
If, therefore, the special sciences confine themselves
to explaining the connexion of phenomena by the
external relations of causality and reciprocity, this
proves nothing in regard to the limits of knowledge.
It proves only that such sciences are not able to
speak the last word as to the nature of the objects
with which they deal. For, in order to speak that
last word, we must regard the world — and everything
368 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
exercise, carries with it an ideal of freedom or self-
determination, which sets it in abstract opposition to
the objective world as a system of necessity. This
also causes it to condemn that world as phenomenal,
and to look beyond it to an intelligible world, in
which all things are determined according to the law
of liberty, and to a divine intelligence which orders
all things according to that law. But one of the
necessary presuppositions of this view has already
disappeared when we have rejected the conception of
the objective world as a world of necessity. And
the other necessary presupposition must also dis-
appear, when we recognise that the subjective unity of
self-consciousness cannot be severed from the objec-
tive consciousness of the world in space and time.
The relativity of object and subject to each other
implies that the unity of the intelligence must
be found also in the object; but it also implies
that the intelligence or conscious self, in seeking to
realise itself in the object, is only bringing to light
what the true nature of the object is. Hence, we
cannot suppose that the aspirations of the soul or the
obligations of the will can carry us into a new region
absolutely separated from that phenomenal world,
which is the object of our knowledge. On the con-
trary, the practical must be viewed as continuous
with the theoretical life, and it must be recognised
that, if the former goes farther than the latter,
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
369
it is still on the same road. The good cannot be
opposed to the true; for they are only different
aspects of the relation of the same self to the
same all-embracing whole, in which the self finds
its objective counterpart. Thus the contrast of
knowing and willing cannot be treated as an abso-
lute one, so soon as we discern that in knowing we
are coming to the consciousness of self as well as of
the objective world, and that in action we are realis-
ing an end which is involved in the nature of the
world as well as in our own nature. It is true that
in both cases, in knowledge as in action, the univer-
sality of the principle that manifests itself in our lives
is at first hidden from us by the conditions of its pro-
gressive manifestation. What we know seems to be
only the particular things with which our senses
bring us into contact; what we will seems to be
only the particular objects which excite our desires.
We do not reflect that all known objects already have
taken their place in the one world to which all that
is knowable by the one self must belong ; nor that
all objects of desire must be sought sub rations boni ,
as the satisfaction of a self which, as it is a unity
to which all ends are related, cannot be satisfied with
anything but the whole. Thus through all the stages
of their development, the theoretical and the prac-
tical consciousness are actuated by the same princi-
ples, and have to contest with the same difficulties:
VOL. x. ‘2 a
370 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
nor is it possible to separate the one from the other
without mutilating both.
We may put this point in a more palpable way,
if we consider that the opposition of practical to
theoretical reason, which Kant * maintains, resolves
itself into an opposition of that which ought to be
to that which is. The good is an ‘ ought- to-be ’ of
reason, which never is realised in the phenomenal
world. But, if the above criticisms have any
value, this opposition must be broken down on both
sides. For, on the one hand, the real, which is the
object of knowledge, cannot be regarded as a dead
reality which exists apart from any movement in
itself or in the intelligence which apprehends it,
but only as the expression of an absolute inte lli gence
which reveals itself both in the object and in the
mind. Nor, on the other hand, can the good be
taken as mere ideal, an ‘ ought-to-be/ which is present
to our minds but has no necessity of realisation ; for,
as the good of a self, it has in itself a principle to
which all knowable objects are related. Hence it
is realised, or is realising itself, in all things, even
in those which seem most to hinder its realisation.
It is impossible to sever the absoluteness of the
moral law, upon which Kant so strongly insists,
from the idea that “ morality is the nature of
things ” : in other words, that it is a principle
yrhich is realising if self in the objective world.
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
371
Thus also morality passes into religion, not as with
Kant by the external postulate of a Deus ex machina
who shall bind together goodness with happiness, or
the spiritual with the natural world, but by the
recognition that there is one principle underlying
both. Eor the very essence of religion lies in the
consciousness that what we have presented to us in
the objective world is not a foreign necessity, which
has no relation, or only an accidental relation to
our will, but rather an environment which is
the necessary condition of its exercise; and, con-
versely, that what we seek as the highest in our
practical life, is not a mere subjective end, to which
we try to subordinate all that is without u*s. Rather
that it is one and the same end which is revealed
both within and without, in the order of nature
and history and in the wants and aspirations of our
spirits. Our theoretical and our practical conscious-
ness are thus in continuity with each other. We
have not in the one the determination of the self
by an objective world which is independent of us
and our desires, succeeded in the other by the un-
availing, or only partly successful, effort to subdue
such objects to our will. We discern that, in
knowledge, we are active as well as passive; and
that, in practice, we are passive as well as active.
Or, more properly, we discern that the opposition
of activity and passivity does not hold good, when
372 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
we are attempting to describe the relations of
spiritual beings, who are members of the great
organic whole of the universe, to that divine Spirit
which is the principle of that whole. Rather we
are obliged to say that these members are active,
because, and just so far as, the principle of the
whole is active in them.
It appears, then, that there is an essential fallacy
in the Kantian attempt to confine science to the
sphere of phenomenal objects which are connected to-
gether only by an external necessity, and to refer
all our higher consciousness of reality, whether re-
ligious or philosophical, to the demands of practical
reason. But the same criticism applies also to the
opposite view of Aristotle, that it is the practical
reason which is immersed in the phenomenal world —
in the world of external necessity and contingency of
which science in the strict sense of the term is
impossible; while it is the theoretical reason which
alone is able to grasp things in their essential nature,
and to follow out the inner necessity by which all
their attributes are connected ; and, above all, it is the
theoretical reason alone that can rise to the contem-
plation of God as the principle of all reality, the first
and the final cause of the universe. We must, I
think, recognise that in this view also there is an
unhappy divorce between the two sides of man’s life;
and that his higher or religious consciousness can no
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
373
more be conceived as abstractly theoretical than it
can be conceived as abstractly practical. The idea
that science is concerned only with deducing the
nature of things from their essential definitions —
from the formal or final cause of their being — is as
one-sided as the Kantian conception that it has to do
only with measuring the phenomena as they are given,
and determining the external conditions of their
co-existence or succession. For neither of these is
possible without the other. A teleology that takes no
account of mechanism is as imperfect as a mechanical
philosophy that takes no account of teleology. The
latter, indeed, is less of an illusion ; for a science that
deals with efficient, and not with formal or final causes,
is a true science so far as it goes. It enables us to
find order in the world, though it may be only an
external order. It thus lays the true foundation for
a systematic view of things, even though it may not
be able to give to that view the highest kind of unity.
It exhibits to us the anatomical structure and mecha-
nical relations of the parts of the body, though it is
not able to detect the secret of its life. On the othe>*
hand, as the work of the Scholastics often showed,
the attempt to deal directly and immediately with
formal and final causes, is apt to lead to a philosophy
of foregone conclusions, which stereotypes our first
notions of things, and attempts, by merely analysing
these notions, to add to our knowledge of their objects.
374 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
So understood, the demonstrative syllogism of Aristotle
becomes a mere formal exercise of thought which can
only bring out in the conclusion what has been
assumed, and even explicitly assumed in the premises.
We cannot, indeed, attribute such a notion of
science to Aristotle ; for as I have shown in an earlier
lecture, his definitions were not mere reproductions
of popular notions, but were reached by an inductive
and dialectical process which is closely analogous to
the methods of modern science. At the same time, we
have to recognise that there were defects in Aristotle’s
logic which gave too much encouragement to the
Scholastic interpretation of it. In the first place, he
assumed that by a direct process of induction it is
possible at once to rise to an explanation of nature
by formal or final causes. Thus he thought it possible
to solve the whole problem of science at one stroke,
and did not recognise that we must use lower cate-
gories before we proceed to higher categories ; in other
words, that we must connect the phenomena with
which we are dealing in an external way as causes
and effects of each other, before we can safely attempt
to grasp their essential individuality and the organic
relations by which they are bound to each other and to
the mind that knows them. It is true that besides
the science that demonstrates the properties of sub-
stances through their essential definition, Aristotle
also refers to a kind of science which has to determine
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 375
the causes of particular events, such, for instance, as
an eclipse. Like Plato, therefore, he recognises that
the external or mechanical action of substances upon
each other is worthy of investigation as well as the
formal or teleological principles that are realised in
them. And, especially in his biological works, he
carries the investigation of the necessary conditions,
without which the ends of nature cannot be achieved,
to a point far beyond the imaginary physics of the
Timaeus. But such enquiries into ‘ second causes ’
do not, in his view of science, take the important
place which has been given to them in modern
times; still less does he suppose that they precede
and condition the higher kind of knowledge which
deals with the essential forms of things. 1
1 In one sense we might say that for Aristotle the sole dvayicaiov,
the sole condition sine qua non y of the realisation of the ends of nature
is matter. But, in his special enquiries, matter is never taken in
the sense of the ultimate indeterminate vky, hut always as the
specialised matter which is necessary for a particular purpose, e.g.
in the life of an animal or a plant. Hence the investigation of
material causes is really an enquiry into the special actions and
reactions of the elements of such specialised matter upon each
other or upon the environment — in other words, it is an enquiry
into efficient causes. We have, however, to observe that efficient
cause is taken by Aristotle in two quite different senses. In the
Metaphysic , the efficient cause generally means a substance which
exists prior in time to the effect, and has the same forms realised
in it as in the effect. (Cf. Met. } 1032a, 25, where Aristotle refers
to his usual example: &p0pca7ro$ yap dvOpwirov yepvq..) In other
cases the term efficient cause is used by Aristotle in the modern
sense, as meaning the conditions of an effect, which, as Aristotle
also observes, do not precede it in time {An. Post ., 95a, *22).
376 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
In the second place, as I tried to show in the
last lecture, Aristotle, almost in spite of himself, is
forced by his doctrine as to matter to recognise an
essential opposition between the universal and the
particular. Hence no science seems to him exact
except as it approximates to the type of mathematics.
He saw, indeed, that the exactness of mathematical
science rests upon abstraction, but he did not discern
that the same defect of abstractness would attach
to any attempt to determine individual substances
apart from each other, and he even seemed to adopt
the principle that the highest substance is that which
is most simple. Hence, in what he supposed to be
the absolutely regular movement of the heavens he
saw a higher manifestation of intelligence than in
the confused and complex motions of earthly things
and beings. In this there is obviously manifested the
influence of a false ideal of knowledge ; for, even if
we conceived the stellar motions as he did, that is to
say, as circular motions absolutely continuous and
regular, or only irregular in so far as many spheres are
concerned in the movement of one body, this absence
of complexity would seem to us to involve that there
is less, and not more, need for a spiritual principle to
explain them. In both cases, however, in astronomy
as in mathematics, we are really dealing with what
is general and abstract — with aspects of the existence
of material objects, the exactness of our knowledge
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
377
of which is dependent on the fact, that we consciously
omit, or unconsciously neglect, their relations to other
parts or elements of reality. In like manner, the
comparative exactness of physical science in general
is at least partly due to the fact that we regard its
objects merely as material things, and omit altogether
to take into account their relations to life and mind.
Hence, though this kind of exactness seems to diminish
as we rise in the scale of the sciences from physics to
chemistry, from chemistry to biology, from biology to
psychology, this does not mean that we are passing
from that which is more to that which is less in-
telligible ; rather it means the reverse of this. It
means that we are bringing our science nearer and
nearer to the complex whole to which these abstracted
elements belong, and, therefore, are leaving less and
less to take its place with the accidental or inexplicable.
It is true that, as we advance, just because we are
leaving the region of the abstract, we are brought into
contact with greater difficulties. The unexplained
remainder, that is, the numerous objects and events
which, after all that the special sciences can do, are
still incompletely accounted for — all this apparently
accidental element in life does not press itself upon
our notice, while we are dealing with the abstractions
of mathematics, or with what we may call the natural
abstraction of the motions of the heavenly bodies.
Even in physics and chemistry we are not much
378 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
troubled with the consciousness of it, because in these
sciences we are satisfied with finding the causes or
conditions of the particular phenomena, and are not
embarrassed by the thought of any general purpose
or teleological unity that binds all the particular
phenomena together as elements in one whole. But
biology brings with it the conceptions of organic unity
and evolution ; it exhibits to us, in the plant and still
more in the animal, a whole the parts of which are
means and ends to each other. Here, therefore, we
begin to be embarrassed by the fact that the purposes
of the individual life and of the life of the species are
so often thwarted and interfered with by what seem
to be external accidents; or, in other words, that
the environment is so often at war with the life
instead of subserving it. And when we come to the
spiritual life of man, with its still higher purposes and
its deeper teleological unity, we are still more disturbed
by what seems the frequent defeat of rational order by
external accidents — by the catastrophe of individual
lives that seemed to contain so high promise in them,
by the way in which the course of social progress is so
often stopped or turned back, and by that mixture of
success and failure in the attainment of good, which
renders it so difficult to discover any general meaning
in human history. Thus in the moral sciences we
are continually dealing with the struggle of the will
of man to remould nature, and, we may add, his own
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
379
natural life, in conformity with his spiritual needs ; and
these two sides of our existence, by their co-existence
and interference with each other, by their partial
agreement and yet frequent collision, at once tend to
awaken in our minds the idea of a rational plan and
purpose, and at the same time to oppress us with
a consciousness of its imperfect realisation. It is
thus that the practical life of man appears to be
the peculiar sphere of accident and caprice, just
because it forces upon us the conception of a universal
system of reason which would not admit any accident
or caprice at all.
All this might make us inclined to accept the
Aristotelian notion that ethics is the science in
which least exactness is to be expected, and that it
is excluded altogether from that sphere of demon-
stration in which reason finds its highest exercise.
In truth, however, such a view rests upon an
illusion. The inorganic world taken by itself — in-
cluding the heavenly bodies, which the Greeks deified,
and even Aristotle and Plato treated as free from all
imperfection and accident — is the sphere of an external
necessity which, as Aristotle discerned, is closely con-
nected with contingency . 1 It is in the organic world,
1 In Met., VI, 3, Aristotle seems to come very near to the modern
idea that, in the endless series of efficient causes we must stop
somewhere, and that the necessity of this arbitrary stop forces us
to regard the whole series as contingent. But Aristotle does not
definitely say this. Elsewhere he seems to take as contingent
380 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
and still moie in man’s moral life, and in the subjection
of nature to the higher ends of that life, that purpose or
design begins clearly to manifest itself. Here, therefore,
we have the first lifting of the veil of contingency
from nature ; and it is natural, as I have already
suggested, that this partial revelation should awaken
the desire for a more complete manifestation of
spiritual law in the natural world. In ethics, there-
fore, we are vexed with an antagonism of principles
which, without going beyond the sphere of our science,
we cannot finally solve. But it is the peculiar
task of philosophy, following out the forecast of
religion, to develop that idealistic view of the
world which supplies the only possible key to such
difficulties, and enables us to see that the principle
of nature and the principle of man’s higher life
are one, and that it is an imperfect interpretation
of the facts which regards them as coming into
collision with each other. In other words, it is its
business to raise the intuitive certitude of religion —
its unreflecting faith in goodness and God — into the
clear reflective consciousness that the world is an
organic system, the principle of which is spiritual.
But it is impossible that philosophy should attain
to such an interpretation of things, as it has too often
tried to attain to it, by the way of abstraction, by
whatever cannot be traced to the operation of formal, final, or
even efficient causes. Cf. Vol. I, p. 325 note.
TO REASON OR TO WILL?
381
turning away from the difficulties of the special
sciences, and especially from the difficulties that beset
us in the explanation of the practical life of man. On
the contrary, it can solve them, or approximate in any
measure to the solution of them, only by taking a more
comprehensive and complete view of the facts than is
possible in any of the special sciences. And, as it
is an imperfect religion which withdraws itself from
any of the concrete interests of life — from art
or literature, from trade or politics — and seeks to
escape from their manifold difficulties and dangers by
occupying itself only with what are technically called
‘religious interests/ and, as it were, hiding itself in
the sanctuary : so it is an imperfect philosophy which
finds the highest truth in a pure contemplation, which
confines itself to the most general ideas, and throws
no new light upon the results of natural or ethical
science. Philosophy must, indeed, change our ordinary,
and even our scientific views of reality ; it must give
a new meaning to life : but it can do so only as it
re-interprets our common experience, and shows us that
the world we live in, here and now, is a spiritual world.
The general result to which our argument brings us
is that neither the theoretical nor the practical life
can be viewed as the exclusive source of that higher
consciousness which is manifested in religion and
philosophy. Aristotle's exaltation of pure contempla-
tion and Kant’s exaltation of practical reason equally
382
REASON OR WILL
rest upon a false abstraction. To say, with the latter,
that we can think and believe what we cannot know
is arbitrarily to confine our knowledge of the objective
world to lower categories than those which we apply
to the inner life of the conscious self, and to forget
that the consciousness of the self cannot be severed
from the consciousness of the world. To say, with
Aristotle, that we can know that which is universal
and eternal, but that we cannot, in the full sense
of the word, know that which is particular and
temporal, is to suppose that we reach the highest
reality by abstraction, and to forget that the ulti-
mate truth must be that which is most complex and
concrete, as it is that in which all other truth
reaches its completion. We cannot find an ultimate
principle of unity either in the subject as separated
from the object or in the object as separated from the
subject, since it is only in rising above this division
that we have any apprehension of such a principle.
Hence, also, any exclusive emphasis on the theoretical
or the practical consciousness must tend to empty the
consciousness of God of its peculiar meaning and
content. If, therefore, there be any sense in which the
religious consciousness may be regarded as contem-
plative, it is not as excluding, but as at once including
and transcending the practical consciousness. Whether
there is any trace of such a view in Aristotle, we shall
have to consider in the next lecture,
UNIVERSA
UNI 1
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11